Siren Song

My Brush with Undeath, and Guess What! I Have a MEDICAL CONDITION!

2012-02-09T20:53:00.005-05:00

Last week Diane took me back to see Jane the (allegedly not a zombie) doctor, because Jane said she wanted to check on my plantar wart but really I think that was just a giant scheme to get me in there so she could give me a tetanus shot, since apparently there is some rule that everyone has to have one of those. I thought I'd gotten all the necessary immunizations shortly after moving in with Carolyn, but either that one didn't get written down or I never got it or Jane had ulterior zombie motives or who knows.

Anyhow while we were there, I mean before people started attacking me with needles, Jane asked if there were any health things going on and I said no, except my left ear had been irritated, like, super itchy, lately but I thought it was maybe just a zit in there or something. Whereupon she whipped the ear gadget off the wall and looked in the WRONG ear and I was like, okay, maybe she has dyslexia or something. Well, maybe what went through my head wasn't quite that compassionate. I might have thought something along the lines of zombie dementia, although I'm pretty sure I didn't say anything like that out loud. But then, as though she could HEAR me thinking, she said it's normal operating procedure to check the "good" ear first so as to have something to compare the other one to. So okay. Maybe she actually knows what she's doing. Although the part about operating worried me a bit. I mean, I hadn't started the day expecting an ear amputation.

Then she looked in the other ear for half a second and said some complicated medical thing and then when I didn't respond with a look of comprehension she said, "Swimmer's Ear." Which you can get even if you're not a swimmer, and it might be some sort of bacterial thing or some sort of fungus thing and she went on for a bit but I didn't really hear the rest of it because I was too intrigued by the idea of growing a fungus in my ear. Maybe all my efforts to kill off the plantar wart on my heel only caused it to submerge and then crawl up the inside of my skin until it got to my ear, is what I suggested. Which is when Jane got the glazed-eyed look (sort of like a ZOMBIE, maybe?) and Diane gave me the LOOK that means shut up, you're scaring the help. Which kind of pissed me off a little because I think you should be able to have whatever fun you can when you're stuck in a little tiled room with someone who has gone out of her way to inform you that she's not a zombie.

Anyhow then ostensibly not a zombie Jane left and someone else, who would no doubt claim to not be a member of Jane's zombie army so I saw no point in raising the subject, came and gave me the shot and said it might hurt. But you know what's weird? I totally watched her put that needle in and I didn't feel a thing until she squeezed the thing to put the juice in my arm. That's when I felt it. I mean, it didn't really hurt, but I thought it was interesting how you can jam a needle an inch into someone's muscle and it only becomes bothersome when the helpful thing, the medicine, gets involved.

Then we left and went to the pharmacy to get the ear drops, which turned out to be this goopy crap that once you put in you can never shake your head enough to get rid of the feeling that you have a football stuffed in your ear. I was supposed to put them in four times a day for seven days, even if my ear started feeling better sooner. Okay.

Well by the end of that evening, which was last Wednesday, my tetanus arm ached like that time I tried to recreate the stress-position torture thing that my uncle did, and my head was all lopsided because I hadn't yet resigned myself to the football, and I was cranky and thinking about how Jane never did show much excitement over my healed plantar wart and how the drops and the "tetanus" shot were probably actually her way of trying to zombify me from two directions at once, and I explained all of this to Diane who just rolled her eyes in an unimaginative way. And then shark week of the lady parts came along and this is the hurty month rather than the easy month so there I was, cranky and itchy-eared and achy-armed and menstrual-cramped, hemorrhaging like I thought if I only bled enough all the other discomforts would go away, and probably in the early stages of turning into a zombie on top of everything else.

And yes I was totally faithful about those stupid ear drops. Well, for the first three days anyhow. Then, okay, I admit it, I stopped doing them on a meticulous schedule so it was maybe more like twice a day, and then on the fifth day I sort of, you know, forgot a lot, so I guess I might have only put them in once, when I went to bed. Then I started feeling this weird resistance to putting them in. Like I started really not want to use them any more. Like way out of proportion. To the point where I'd be tired and wanting to go to bed and I'd stall because I didn't want to put them in. And then I'd open the little bottle and hold it over my ear and give it a little squeeze, until I felt the liquid on my skin, and then I'd let go so the bottle would suck it back up, and I'd tell myself it totally counted because the liquid touched my skin. I mean I didn't do that thing where you quit just because your ear feels better. Which I don't even know if it does, by the way, because of all the OTHER stuff which I'm about to explain. But I got through most of the week. Except for the very last day. I was like, I hate this so much I'd rather have a plantar wart in my ear.

Okay anyhow, fast forward to the weekend, when Ellen came over, bringing a yummy chicken sandwich thing for me, which I promptly squirreled away because I like to eat stuff like that in slices in a snacking way throughout the week. Did I mention I don't like to cook? So while I'm here by myself during the day, I'm much more likely to eat if there's something I can easily snack on. The only problem with the chicken sandwich was it had avocado all over the place, which gives me the heebie jeebies, but I'm pretty good at finding all the slimy bits and making them go away.

And then Diane made one of her specialty dishes, curry chicken, which involves using about five times more curry than the recipe actually calls for because Diane and I, we like the curry, yes we do. She always makes a giant batch because we both love it and again, I'm better at eating if I can just heat up leftovers in the microwave.

So all week I've been eating leftover bits of slightly-avocado-tainted sandwich and super spicy curry chicken, happy as can be, when suddenly two days ago I started ITCHING.

I didn't say anything at first because it started in the nether regions, and much as I like to announce every tiny bit of my experience to the entire world, there's not much fun in running around saying your crotch feels itchy. As the day progressed it felt more troublesome, and because I think it's funny to take a small symptom and diagnose it as something lethal, or if not lethal than at least gross, I went online to find all the reasons why one's nether bits might suddenly feel itchy. Then I lay in wait for Diane to come home so I could nonchalantly spring it on her that I might have crabs. Which of course is completely ridiculous but it DID kind of fit the itch pattern and it was awesome to see the look on her face. "I probably got it from the hairdresser's," I added, in a voice like I was confiding useful knowledge. I wish I could show pictures of Diane's face. Because she really does the most horrified-looking blanch you ever saw.

Okay so that was funny. But the itchiness was not fun. I sat in an oatmeal bath and that helped even though I was completely disappointed to discover that an oatmeal bath does NOT actually involve making a bathtub full of oatmeal that you can slither yourself down into like a deadly stonefish waiting for the next unsuspecting tourist to come along. In fact all an oatmeal bath involves is sprinkling some flaky stuff around and then the stuff totally disappears and there are no bubbles or anything. I think oatmeal baths would be improved if every box of flaky stuff included a tiny capsule or two of those little sponge thingees that expand into animal shapes when they hit the water. You could have piranhas and man-o-wars and deadly puffer fish, for example. A hissing or even a screaming sound as they expand would be cool, too.

Anyhow yesterday when I got up the itching seemed okay, mostly, although I did notice that every time I went to the bathroom, which was thirteen bazillion times because did I mention the part about trying to bleed my way into oblivion? I did notice that taking care of business would sort of get the itch going again for a little bit and the only way to prevent a full-on kill-me-now episode was to NOT SCRATCH. Or even move, for that matter. As you might imagine, I'm pretty good at just holding still when there's discomfort going on, but it did kind of get me thinking back to the basement days when every other thing felt like a battle against my own natural urges. But it worked well enough. I'd come out of the bathroom and just sit down on the itch and wait it out and it would eventually subside enough for me to remember that my entire existence is not centered on itchiness.

But then by the time I took my nap yesterday, things had changed. Suddenly it wasn't just my private parts; my legs were itchy. My shins were itchy. My achilles tendons were itchy. And my skin looked kind of ... patchy. Like pink patches here and there. Just flat patches, nothing spectacular. Maybe from my jeans rubbing on my legs? Maybe I was somehow getting oversensitized to any contact whatsoever. So I went rooting around in the medicine shelves, and remind me someday to show a picture of our medicine shelf area because looking at it you'd think we have a houseful of total hypochondriacs, which we don't, unless you count the part where I like to go online or look through Diane's psychology books to find the most outlandish explanations for the simplest things.

So I found some Benadryl gel, like for poison ivy, and Benadryl gel became my new best friend because that seemed to do the trick. I mean, I still felt kind of low-level itchy throughout the rest of the day, but it didn't feel intolerable or like the kind of itch where you want to scrape your way out of your skin.

And last night when Diane got home from work I asked her questions about our laundry detergents and such, because that would make sense, right? I mean, I haven't used anything different, no new bath or skin products or whatever. Had she tried to trick me with the detergent again? Maybe a completely new kind? She likes Tide and I like ... uh ... anything that isn't Tide. Tide leaves a funny smell and I always know when she tries to throw my stuff into a Tide load, but she keeps testing it anyhow because for some reason she doesn't believe my nose is sensitive enough to tell the difference. I admit I might have asked her about the detergent in somewhat of an accusing voice, perhaps.

But she said no, swore up and down. So then this morning before she left for work I tried blaming the food. Had she tried to sneak some new nasty thing into the curry chicken? She's famous for trying to sneak stuff in like that. Last time it was asparagus, cut up really small, in the stir fry. I really thought you wouldn't notice if it were really small, she said. While I laboriously disentangled every offending bit of asparagus and stacked them all on the side of the plate while maintaining a long-suffering demeanor. "I'm the Princess and the Pea of asparagus," I said. Which she agreed with in a not-exactly admiring kind of way.

Anyhow, no to that as well: Diane had not tried to sneak some new ingredient into one of my favorite dishes because new things are good for me. Could it be the avocado-taint? That didn't make sense either. I've eaten avocado just fine before, I mean when it was totally mashed into other stuff and not in giant disgusting slimy chunks. So maybe it was just dry skin. Maybe I just need to moisturize or some girly shit like that. We both shrugged it off. Diane went to work and I went back to the computer to research whether itching might be a known side effect of a slow-growing zombie fungus virus.

Then a few hours later my palms started itching. Yes. My PALMS. I went over near the window to get better light and I could see these pale pink places, really faint, under the skin. Have you ever had itchy palms? It's fucking maddening.

Maddening, and weird enough for me to think maybe it was time to call in the big guns. So before I lay down for my nap, I texted Ellen, who has a regular Thursday bodywork appointment with a client down at this end of the Cape, and she said she'd swing by on her way home. In addition to being a social worker and a bodyworker and annoying in many respects, Ellen is also a doctor, or a Nurse Practitioner, just like little old I-swear-I'm-not-a-zombie Jane. Ellen's not really doing doctorly things so much as social-worker things these days, but she still has a lot of cool gizmos and, I suppose, a useful knowledge base.

Then as I was snuggling in for my midday nap I felt this super intense itchy spot on my ribs. I went running into the bathroom and there were these two perfect little welts. And guess what is better than Benadryl gel? Benadryl spray! I was able to get things under control enough to take my nap, sort of, but while I was falling asleep I could feel myself sort of shivering a little and getting goosebumps. I cranked my heated mattress pad up to its max and still felt cold. There was, however, a thrilled cat with me. Miro loves that heated mattress pad almost as much as she loves Diane's snore pillow, maybe even more. In the end it was a miserable nap, because I simply could not get warm and then every time Miro twitched or flicked her tail around in her sleep, the movement against my leg would set off a tiny itchy feeling.

So anyhow Ellen arrived a while later and looked me over and said what I have is HIVES and it means I'm having an allergic reaction to something. Hives appear and disappear here and there and that's why it seems like it's a new thing in a new location every time. But each of my itchy symptoms is not its own new thing, each one is just an example of the underlying reaction. She was a bit alarmed until I reassured her I've had absolutely no trouble with my breathing feeling tight or my tongue swelling out of my head or my ribcage growing a parasitic twin or anything like that. "Well, I'm kind of disappointed to hear you're not growing a parasitic twin," she said gravely, when I mentioned that part. Sometimes I totally adore Ellen.

We went back to the medicine shelves looking for Benadryl pills and what is the one thing we don't have? But I did find some Claritin, which has the word "antihistamine" on the box, and she said that should help. I didn't tell her the box says it expired in 2007, because she might have wanted to make me wait until she went out and got some updated pills and by then I was feeling so crazy itchy I would've swallowed a fossil mammoth if I knew it had eaten an antihistamine before it died.

Then Ellen grilled me on every single ailment or rash I've ever had (none) or can ever remember Serena, Allison, or my uncle having. Did I remember any of them having funny-colored patches or anything? Okay this was a loaded question because I've always had a strange way of looking at people and I've always imagined I see colors on them that aren't actually there. It's just a way I came up with, I think, of interpreting intuitions into a vocabulary that used colors instead of words. So yeah, I can remember lots of times when I saw funny-colored patches on them.

But I tried to think past or through that to times when I might have seen things on actual skin, things other people would be able to see, too.

Well Serena was full of rashes and oozy parts and crusty bits, especially towards the end, but that didn't seem signficant since that's kind of what happens when you have crappy personal hygiene, self-mutilating tendencies, and a raging heroin addiction. As for my uncle, I remember him in a weirdly idealized way, as sort of smooth and pale and flawless. (Skin-wise, I mean, obviously. Like, I know the guy was seriously otherwise flawed.) And the only thing I could come up with for Allison -- and I had to really dredge it up from the back of my brain -- was a single moment of an image from forever ago, when I remember seeing a lovely color of rosy reddish pink on her. I remember it because she had pale skin, and it was so distinct. It went down the front of her in a V from her shoulders to the middle of her chest. This image is completely out of context, just a thing in itself, but it's clear in a frozen-snapshot moment way.

And as I was describing it, Ellen's eyes lit up and she yelled "That's classic!" in a voice like a game show host announcing a winner. I guess she thought this mattered because Allison and I share the same gene pool, which means there's some precedence for my having an allergy. But since I have no idea why Allison had that rash, it didn't do much to help us narrow down what I was being allergic to.

So we had to go through all the same stuff I'd already gone through, things I'd eaten or been exposed to and blah blah blah and then I said maybe it was the tetanus shot! Maybe Jane the yeah suuure she's not a zombie doctor had her minion inject me with zombie juice after all, and I'm allergic to it, which would mean it's a good thing because when the zombies come, itchy or not I want to fight them, not be one of them. Ellen totally ignored me because clearly she doesn't know how to think outside the zombie box and also her gears were going in there and then her eyes got gleamy again and she asked me if I still had the information sheet for the ear drops.

Long story short: Ellen thinks I might have an allergy to sulfa-based antibiotics. Which the ear drops contain. How one gets hives all over one's body as a result of ear drops is a bit of a mystery to me but Ellen assures me it's possible.

She says it's not a hugely rare allergy to have, and that hives and fever can go with either a mild or a more severe reaction, but that I need to make sure to call the doctor's office tomorrow and explain what happened. And I need to stop using the ear drops immediately. "Is last night soon enough?" is what I asked.

Remember the part about how I had kind of stopped being faithful about the ear drops? Okay, fine, how I totally decided partway through that the drops were the worst thing on earth and I'd rather grow ear mushrooms than use them? Ellen thinks maybe that was my body's way of trying to protect itself. She has lots of theories about how bodies know things that our thinking minds aren't consciously aware of.

"I'm not condoning you refusing to use the meds as prescribed," she added, somewhat lamely, in my opinion. "But it's good that you stopped when you did. Drug allergies are weird, and they can be dangerous."

"So I had a close call?"

"Well, I don't know. Maybe. Sometimes an allergy is just what it is and other times it can escalate with continued exposure. What I'm saying is it's good your system isn't still having to deal with new exposures to the drug." She tilted her head a little. "And it's good that your first reaction wasn't a severe one, like anaphylaxis."

"Anaphylactic shock? Can't you die from that?"

"You can die really fast from that."

"Oh my god! I almost died! Jane tried to kill me! I can't wait to tell Diane. I knew Jane was bad news the minute she started going on about how she wasn't a zombie."

"Well you know," she said thoughtfully, "sulfa-based drugs ARE a commonly-used vector of the zombie virus establishment."

Have I mentioned how much I love Ellen?

So anyway, there you have it. It's five hours later and I'm still itching but that fossilized Claritin seems to have taken the edge off, or maybe the zombie juice is working its way out of my system or whatever. I'm still popping hives here and there, but with the antihistamine it's easier to just feel the hive happen and then be like, okay, if I just wait a bit it will go away. And it does. But Ellen still seems to want to keep an eye on me, I guess. Like, she's going to stay here tonight, just in case.

And then just a few minutes ago she shows me her emergency lifesaving device, which she calls an eppy-pen because there's a chemical involved whose name starts with that sound. I ask if we can try it out on me just once, just to see, and she rolls her eyes and says no, you only get one try with it. The way it works is if someone stops breathing and starts turning purple, you jam it into her thigh.

"Like this," she says, making a stabbing motion. Oh I want to do the stabby lifesaving thing so much.

"Why do you have one of those anyhow," I ask. "Is it something all nurse practitioners carry around as a matter of course?"

"Only if they're severely allergic to something," she says.

"What are you allergic to?"

Turns out she doesn't know! All she knows is one time she had scallops at a restaurant and had one of those reactions where your throat closes and you die unless you're lucky enough that someone else at the restaurant happens to be carrying an eppy-pen. She'd had scallops before, though, and she's had them since, so she knows it's not scallops. But it's something that sometimes goes into food.

"Could be zombie virus juice," I say. "I'm having a close call with that as we speak. I'm fighting the undead even just sitting here. Look!" And I show her my arm, where a new little hive has just poked out.

"Well, I will feel a lot better once you stop sprouting hives," she says.

Won't we all.

The Decomposing Dolphin Palette

2012-02-01T15:19:00.003-05:00

Last entry I tried to make a sensitive tribute to the sad passing of two dolphins, but of course because I am me and have the friends that I have, things behind the scenes degenerated rather quickly and before long faithful reader and dear friend Rachael and I were cracking ourselves up, emailing back and forth about color palettes inspired by things like dead dolphins. Rachael started it off with this comment on my previous post:

"There's this website going around called Design Seeds. I see it on Pinterest everywhere, because apparently every single person on earth is planning either a wedding or a home redesign that they need color palette inspiration for. Basically what the website does is takes a picture with pretty colors and makes a palette out of them and gives it a cutesy name. On the main page right now, I'm seeing 'whipped pink' and 'spring petals' and 'giraffe tones.'

"So now, seeing these pictures of the dead dolphins in conjunction with your comment that you're posting them because you think the colors are pretty, all I can think is ... Design Seeds should do a "dead dolphin" palette... ."

Okay I admit it. I went to the Design Seeds website to see if it had some automated process by which I could upload my dead dolphin photograph and receive a tasteful color palette in return. But I could find no such function there, so I just shrugged and moved on.

Rachael, however, was not so easily daunted. Did she just shrug and move on? No she did not. She downloaded the dead dolphin photo from my blog and applied her mad artistic skillz to the project, and yesterday in my inbox I found this:

That's right, folks. The Decomposing Dolphin Color Palette!

I cannot even tell you how much I love this.

And clearly Rachael has a special talent. I suggested she start a little business where people send her creepy photographs and she makes lovely, tastefully-named color palettes out of them, and not surprisingly, this idea had already quite occurred to her and she was about twenty-seven steps ahead of me in her thinking. She showed me another palette, and explained her ideas, and rather than steal her thunder I urge you to go check it out for yourself.

Now, as a supportive friend, I think I should send her some creepy pictures. To help her get started, you see. And as I think back through this blog I'm sort of amazed at how very many creepy images I can remember. So many dead things. The severed duck heads. The engorged tick. The tomato hornworm. Miro's giant monkeyfied asshole.

But below are the ones I'm considering sending her. Just for starters, you understand. I'm showing them here in smallified versions so people don't have to see the gory details. Which I'll never understand. For me it's always all about the gory details.

I've even tried to come up with sophisticated artistic names for the palettes-to-be. Because you know how classy and sophisticated I am.

Pretty Pastel Polyp Palette

Erect Zombie Penis Palette

Hello, Kitty Bunghole Palette

Festive Mummified Frog Palette

Whirling Plantar Wart Palette

And I keep coming up with ideas for her. Really inspired ideas. The salsa vomit palette. The extracted tapeworm palette. The emerging botfly palette. The smegma palette. The blue waffle palette! Okay okay, I'll stop. But I want to say I'm totally slaying myself here.

If I could make a career out of scouring the internet for creepy pictures to send to Rachael, I totally would.

Usually I Think Dead Things Are Awesome But This Breaks My Heart

2012-01-30T11:29:00.002-05:00

Yesterday when we took our ritual Sunday morning walk on the beach, Diane and I found two dead dolphins.

Even though these pictures make me sad, I wanted to show them because the colors are so beautiful. I never knew they had bellies all shades of coral pink. [Edited to add: They don't have bellies this color. Apparently it's something that happens after they die. There is something poignant about this to me. I still think the colors are beautiful, though.] And of course I had to touch them. That first picture? How shiny and smooth it looks? That's exactly how it felt. Like touching a soap bubble.

The dolphins have been stranding in record numbers this year.

I've posted these pictures kind of smallish so you don't have to see the gory details close-up if you don't want. Because what happens is the seagulls come and peck, and the first place they go for is the eyes.

I took these pictures while Diane stood off to the side with her hand over her mouth, trying not to cry.

To make up for the sad dolphin pictures, I've included a picture of my ridiculous cat.

Aha! There's my dignity! Found it!

Highlights

2012-01-27T13:00:00.002-05:00

Get it? Highlights? Because this is about my hair? Hahaha! God I love my jokes.

Getting my hair cut means spending the night at Ellen's. It's much less awful now that I have my laptop and can stay in touch with all the important things in life. So much less horrible, in fact, that I'm able to appreciate things I never noticed before because I was so busy complaining about Ellen's ancient useless computer.

For example, check out Ellen's shower floor:

This floor ROCKS.

And the cool joints that hold her house together:

Nails are for babies.

And look! Ellen has woodpeckers! I was standing about ten feet away when I took this picture:

Do not assume that because I'm cute I'm not also
weighing the pros and cons of pecking your eyes out.

Oh, and how funny is it that Ellen puts a padlock on the suet feeder? She has some very smart squirrels, apparently. I refuse to suggest simpler solutions because I think it's hilarious that every time she wants to refill the feeder, she has to unlock it. "I used to keep the key just hanging out there near the feeder," she told me. "Then the little bastards stole that, too."

Okay, so yeah. The hair. Stay on topic, Siren.

Well, before we can actually go to the hair chick's house so I can get tortured half to death in the name of beauty and fashion, we have to do errands. Yes I'm going to tell you every detail of my arduous day. I figure if I had to live through it, the least you can do is suffer through the retelling. Plus when you have a life as small and uneventful as mine, the little things count.

So first we had to go to the UPS place. I thought this would be very exciting -- perhaps a giant depot with hundreds of brown trucks driving around like small parts of a big machine. I thought there would be conveyer belts with packages and maybe even elves or something.

No elves.

We had to go to the UPS place because Ellen was sending a bracelet to some niece. Discussing this with her gave me ample opportunity to show off my own bracelet, which Ellen got me for Christmas, and I did this in a non-subtle way until finally Ellen agreed that yes, my bracelet was way prettier than the bracelet she was sending to her niece, and that yes, this probably means she loves me way more than she loves her niece.

Proof of niecely one-upsmanship.

Then we had to go to CVS to buy a shower cap, which will come into play later on. I was showing Diane the pictures I took and she said if I posted this one I should make the window stickers on the car unreadable. Okay, seriously? Who thinks like this? I asked her if I should also make sure to edit out the license plate of that car there. "No," she said. "That can be our red herring." Did I ever explain how sometimes Diane has a very dry sense of humor? Anyhow if anyone feels the need to stalk the car, when the case goes to court, don't forget to mention that Diane is the one who told you it was okay.

Note how I have cleverly modified the
window sticker to discourage stalking.

There were no elves at CVS either, but I did see this on the way back to the car:

I drove all the elves away.

Okay, okay, the hair. So finally Ellen hands me and my shower cap over to Diane and Diane and I go to the hair place and who is there to greet me? How could I have forgotten?

I love you I love you I love you.

Once we fight our way past the lovesick dog, the hair chick slathers toxic things onto my hair in a complicated way. She doesn't do the cutting part until after the bleaching part. I forget why.

Special prize to anyone who can identify the thing
hanging from the ceiling joists behind me.

Then I sit with my tenaciously brown hair that refuses to bleach out in fewer than two and a half hours. During which time Hair Chick cuts Diane's hair and the two of them gossip about mutual friends and various medical procedures and I sit uncommunicatively at the dining room table with my laptop, which have I mentioned how much I love my laptop? Hair Chick comes over every once in a while to unfold a bit of foil and to make a little clucking sound at how my hair refuses to lighten.

Mostly I just keep my head bent over the computer and try to ignore everything but my game. Because every time I look up, this is what I see.

I still love you. I will always love you.

What does it mean, "Don't look at me"?

How about if I lie down? I can love you lying down.
I have exhausted myself in loving you so hard.

I know you drew an invisible line on the floor but I can't
help it if my paws are kind of stretching across the
line towards you in a beseeching way.


Oh! Did you just look at me again? Does that mean you love me too?

Finally Hair Chick washes out the bleach and gives me the haircut, which involves a lot of snip snip snip scissor sounds near my ears. This sound bugs me so I am unable to keep my wits enough to take anymore pictures because I'm too busy trying to stop my gums from receding all the way off my teeth and up into my sinuses.

Okay fast forward to when Diane brings me home and then leaves again to go do whatever it is she does when she's not annoying me. Ordinarily this is when I would put the hair dye in, but this time I remembered that last time people wanted to know what my hair looked like all bleach-streaked. I bet it looks kind of cool, someone said.

So instead of rushing off to the bathroom to do they dyeing thing, I sat down in front of the computer to grab a few pictures with the idea of proving once and for all that it does not look cool. It looks like a highlighting job gone terribly wrong.

But guess who had been abandoned for more than twenty-four hours? Who didn't care about my hair or my goals? Who would not stop slinking her loudly purring self back and forth between me and the computer screen as she territory-marked all over my chin and chest?

Okay so then the fun part: actually putting the dye in. It's fun because the dye is kind of stiff, so you can make your hair do interesting things:

But really you're not supposed to use the dye to shape your hair in weird ways. Really you're supposed to put the dye in, then put a shower cap on to sort of lock it in so it will stay wet and get totally sucked into your hair. That's the official hairdresser way of explaining it, by the way.

All in all it is a very dignified process.

Then you sit around for another few hours until you think there's no possible way the dye has not sucked itself into every last depth of every last hair pore. Does hair have pores? Anyhow you rinse it out and immediately try to take pictures, even though the drowned-rat look is not your most flattering look. While you're waiting for it to dry, you rediscover some of the special effects in PhotoBooth. Also how did I end up in second person here?

Oh, maybe this is how. Here's what I'd look like if I were an incompletely-separated twin of myself:

You're welcome.

Then I realize I've forgotten the most important thing. THE PURPLE SWEATSHIRT. The inside out, surgically-enhanced, matching purple sweatshirt. Although you know what's weird? No matter what color purple I wear, it ends up looking like it matches.

And even though my hair wasn't completely dry yet, I was like, fuck it. It's two o'clock in the morning and I'm not staying up all night just to catch the perfect picture, which is never gonna happen anyhow because I basically hate every picture I've ever seen of myself. Seriously, why does my nose always look gargantuan? I assure you it looks perfectly normal-sized in real life.

And there you have it. The highlights of my latest hairy ordeal. Highlights! Ha! Is it funny now? Oh, I slay myself.

And Then Suddenly My Life Got Too Eventful to Fit in One Entry

2012-01-24T10:02:00.000-05:00

Remember some months ago when Diane was sick and I threatened to call 911 if she wouldn't drive to the ER and she made fun of my phone phobia and I countered by saying it wouldn't matter because if I had to call 911 I wouldn't have to actually talk with anyone because they send help even if all you do is dial and then hang up? Well guess who has proved herself well beyond her own expectations of crisis-related competence?

That's right. I had to call 911. AND I talked with the person on the other end.

Okay this happened a little while ago and it's taken me until now to find the time to blog about it. Because I was super busy, you see. I had to get to level 60 in my game. Which I did, by the way. And then there were other things.

But anyhow some time back I was sitting here in the living room at my computer and I kept noticing a periodic buzzy sound which would cause the lights to flicker a bit. Dimming lights are nothing new in my house, and the buzzy sound seemed related to the refrigerator kicking on and off. I thought it was a little weird that suddenly the refrigerator seemed to be causing the lights to dim but I didn't make much of it.

Then a day or two later it was morning and Diane was at work and I was just happily grinding away at my game because I was hellbent on getting to level sixty. Which, did I mention, I managed to do? When suddenly the buzzy sound happened and the lights dimmed and then there were all these other sounds, crackle crackle hiss sizzle and then a lot of little explosive popping noises. So I jumped up and realized all the commotion was coming from Diane's bedroom, which is near the kitchen. And not only was there a lot of noise happening but there was also this opaque grey smoke pouring from the wall behind the little refrigerator she has in there. Oh, and flames. Yeah, there were flames. Okay, little flames, and lots of sparks, but flames nonetheless.

So I went galloping to the other end of the house where the breaker box is and turned off the circuit for Diane's room, thinking that would stop the problem, but it didn't, so I turned off the main and went back down to her room and there were STILL flames coming from the surge protector thingee that her little refrigerator (and her TV and all the other stuff) plugged into. It wasn't sparking and popping anymore but the surge protector thingee was definitely on fire.

So I ran back to my end of the house and got my work gloves and then ran back to Diane's end and pulled the surge protector thingee out of the wall WHILE IT WAS STILL ON FIRE and dropped it on the floor.

I didn't take a picture of it while it was on fire because I was busy putting out the fire.

Whereupon it sputtered a bit so I stomped on it and then it wasn't on fire any more. The smoke was horrible though, so I opened the windows in her room to try and air things out.

Now I have to admit I didn't call 911 immediately. I did, however, call Diane, as it happened to be at a time when I knew she'd be between clients, and I very calmly told her I had just saved the house from burning down and that I thought I should get some special recognition for that, like maybe a medal or a holiday in my honor or something.

As I was talking with her I went back to the breaker box and made sure the circuit to her room was still off, then turned the rest of the power back on, thinking I could run an extension cord into her room and set up a fan to get some of the horrible stinky smoke out. But when I turned the power back on, weird things started happening again. The light in the dining room went really dim and started buzzing, and then the TV -- which is out in the living room and on a completely different circuit than Diane's room -- the TV started acting funny. As in, black stinky smoke began to pour out from behind it.

Well I'm not stupid, or not completely stupid. So I went and turned the main circuit off again and that's when Diane said I had to call 911 because there was no way for me to know if there were still some kind of fire BETWEEN the walls. Smoldering insulation or whatever.

So I did. I told them what happened and that I didn't think it was an emergency and they said, well, there could still be a fire and someone was on the way. So I hung up the phone and looked around and felt an immediate overwhelming gratitude for that uninterruptible power supply I'd bought in order to protect my brain-transplanted mac from exactly this sort of situation. I could hear sirens from the center of town and there I was, carefully saving and closing and quitting my applications and shutting down and unplugging my computer.

I also took the time to jump up on a chair and remove the cover from the hard-wired smoke detector that we have in the living room. Why do we have the smoke detector covered? Well if you must know, it's because every time I do any sort of electrical soldering, that damn thing goes off. If I run a saw in the house it goes off. If I think too hard about a sexy thing it goes off. So we keep it covered. Shut up. Soldering is important, dammit.

Anyhow long story short, I had a firetruck and a fireman, who wasn't actually a man but the term "fireman" seems kind of generic to me so I'm going with that, and there might have been a boy fireman but you know I have trouble noticing boys because when there are girls around I kind of forget that boys are people too, etc. There was another official person there in a uniform but she didn't have all the cool stuff like oxygen tanks and a giant helmet so I didn't pay much attention to her, either.

Notice how I have cleverly smudged out the name of my town on the back of her jacket.

The coolest thing about my fireman was she had this thing, this little camera that showed heat, and she scanned it all over every wall in the house and it was quite sci-fi. There was a special fireman-related electrician dude there too, and at one point we walked around outside looking at the wires and then he said, "Aha!" and pointed and this is what we saw:

Can you find the fire hazard in this picture?

Then there was the electric company guy who let me play with the wire after he cut it down and here is a close-up view of the problem:

The neutral was fried, for those of you who like to know the details.

Anyhow, yeah, it was all very exciting and we did lose a few bits of household equipment that couldn't handle the weird power surging through them: our cordless phones, our cable boxes, a dvd player, and, ironically, the ADT alarm system. There was a tiny bit of wall damage in Diane's room:

That's about how big the flames were.

Oh and before you ask, Miz Miro her royal hiney-ness is totally fine. The way she dealt with all the commotion was to run behind the couch and jam her head under the bookcase. It was kind of hilarious and pathetic. I leaned over the back of the couch and I could see her whole self sticking out, except for her head. I didn't have time to get a picture, though, because that's about when the firemen started up a giant fan to blow some of the horrible smoke out, which made both me and Miro jump through the roof and after that I didn't see her again for hours. But she's fine. All the fire people were very conscientious about making sure they didn't let her get outside.

So yeah. That was exciting.

• • •

Even more exciting, though, is a couple days ago we had our first real snowstorm!

Here's a partial view of my house, all buried:

And here is a view from my front deck of Diane shoveling:

Note that I have enhanced Diane's features to better convey her emotional state at the time. I love when it snows, but Diane doesn't like snow AT ALL. It's also possible she was a bit cranky because I was taking pictures instead of helping her shovel.

• • •

Okay so all that was eventful but I was saving the most exciting news for last. And then I realized I've spent so long playing catch-up that it's ten o'clock and I haven't played my game yet. Plus as usual it turns out the hair thing is a story in and of itself. So here's a hint and I'll be back soon with the rest:

Did someone need a haircut, maybe? Some purple wouldn't hurt either.

Birthday

2012-01-09T10:37:00.001-05:00

Guess what I'm getting for my birthday! A new laptop! A Mac, of course. And guess who is waiting on pins and needles just HOPING for the stranger to come tromping up the walkway and banging on the door? Apparently another way through my social anxieties is a good old Macintosh computer.

Diane and Ellen decided I needed this because any time I go to Ellen's house I complain mightily about having to use her crappy IBM laptop. I mean, I also have Carolyn's old one, the one she left me when she died, the one with all the odd notes and puzzles on it, but at this point that one's pretty obsolete too, and plus I haven't wanted to mess with it because I have this thing about wanting to leave it just the way she left it or something.

Oh and I do realize that this is all just a giant trick to get me more comfortable being away from home by eliminating one of the primary things that makes me unhappy about being away. I don't care, though, because I think it will be great fun, and also I might be able to rope Ellen into playing a bit of Glitch with me on the nights she's around.

It's supposed to arrive by the tenth, but I'm hoping it will be here today. It would be a great birthday present.

In other news, Diane not only managed to avoid her own birthday last month by going to Florida, but also has skipped out on mine. Well, mostly. Technically she was here for the first few hours of today, but then staggered off very early this morning for the airport to go down to Florida again with Justine.

And you know what a Florida trip means. That's right. Ellen is here and so are Justine's animals, the half-dead dog and the fully-crazy cat.

Anyhow, yeah. Happy birthday to me! And here's to another year of unfolding.

Naming Names

2012-01-08T18:15:00.005-05:00

Is it weird to feel connected with someone, to talk with her about sensitive or personal or complicated things, to feel a sense of kinship or intimacy, without ever knowing her name? Other than an online username, I mean. And I don't even mean knowing a full name, I mean, like, just a first name.

Diane and I have been having this DISCUSSION. At the moment it seems to be about names but really I think it might be about more.

Hm. Okay, first a little backing up. Remember my poet? Sharon? The poet skeptic? I spent a good couple months writing pretty obsessively about her. Sometimes I feel embarrassed about that, then I remember she was my first friend, and every speck of having a friend was brand-new to me. I also talked about her a lot here at home. And Diane went through this thing where she kind of grilled me about her, like this total vetting procedure. I remember feeling on-the-spot, trying to be some kind of a shield, trying to protect something. And there was a point where I sort of gave in, somehow, and Diane sat in front of the computer and went to Sharon's blog and examined every last thing under a slightly scary psychological magnifying glass. That was pretty uncomfortable for me, even though I think Sharon found it mostly amusing rather than intrusive.

Diane ended up deciding Sharon was okay. Well, first she just grudgingly admitted Sharon was probably not out to get me or mess with my head. Then over time, when Sharon continued to not display sociopathic tendencies, Diane seemed to decide she was a good person for me to have connected with. Then somewhere in there they ended up being freaking ALLIES, even though they've never actually had any direct interaction that I know of. Like I'd say something about some socially-complicated thing, for example, give an analysis that Diane didn't agree with, and she'd be all, "Oh yeah? What does your POET have to say about it, huh?" And damned if Sharon wouldn't have basically the same take half the time. Bah. Fucking social workers.

In any case the point is that at first Diane seemed really suspicious and sort of threatened -- in particular she had issues with the idea that I could be such close friends with someone who didn't necessarily believe the details of my life story -- and then once I agreed to tell Diane all the things, and let her look for herself, she was satisfied, somehow.

Okay fast forward. Since then I've made other friends, and every once in a while I make enough of a connection with someone that it ends up becoming a part of my daily conversations with my face-to-face people here. Diane knows the main list of people, is familiar with their basic stories, with the basic way I connect with them, all that. She knows Bluejohnnyd is my most faithful Scrabble buddy, that Lexie is in her first year of medical school now, that Lacrema is the one who always has the funnier comeback, the jerk. Sometimes Diane will even ask, out of the blue, about "that one who has the blog," (meaning June) or "the one in Australia" (meaning Andrew). That kind of thing. (She knows about the non-friends, too. "How's your borderline?" she'll ask. Or, "Any news from the sex addict?" And so on.)

[Edited to add: CORRECTION, Lexie just emailed me a somewhat indignant message saying she is not in her first year of medical school, thank you very much, she's in her second year of pharmacy school, and that these distinctions are important. So those of you who worry about my ability to protect your privacy can feel a bit of comfort in knowing that your details are safe with me because half the time I can't even keep them straight, bah.]

So yeah. My online connections become a part of my "real" life, and by extension they become part of Diane's. And when I'm in those early stages of feeling out a new friendship that seems to have potential for being real and deep and interesting, I often end up talking about it with her.

And now, I have this game I play. There's a lot of social stuff there for me. I don't know how other people play, but I often end up just standing there and talking privately with someone via the instant message feature instead of actually doing gamey things like gathering resources or crafting things so as to be able to move up through the levels. (P.S. I'm at 56 out of 60, now, so I'm getting closer to a time when I might be able to de-addict myself a bit.)

In the game, people often have usernames that aren't their real names. So I've made a number of new friends there whom I only know by game names. And with a couple of friends, it's evolved into something more than just fun and friendliness. I mean, I've had some intense conversations with people. Personal life history stuff, abuse stuff, moral stuff, psychological stuff, emotional stuff. You know, real stuff. The most interesting stuff. To me, anyhow.

So blah blah blah. Anyhow, I've been talking with Diane lately about a relatively new connection. Someone I only know by her game name. And the other night, Diane was like, "Does this person have a name?"

"I just told you her name," I say.

We're in the living room, on the couch. We usually eat meals at the coffee table, to satisfy Diane's TV addiction. A lot of our discussions happen in commercial-sized segments. But whenever a conversation gets serious, she takes the clicker from me and turns the volume down. She never turns it off, just down.

"No, I mean a real name."

"Well, of course she does." I say this politely but what I'm thinking is: What a stupid question! Everyone has a real name, duh.

"Can we call her that instead? I can't keep all the SparklePoofs and Razzmatazzes and ex-zee-five-ones straight."

"I don't know her real name," I say. "And you don't have to make fun of people's usernames, either. Just because it's a world you don't understand."

This gets me the raised-eyebrow look, but she doesn't take the bait. "I don't mean her full legal name," she says. "I just mean her first name."

"I don't know her first name."

"You're talking with this person about your uncle and you don't even know her given name?"

"We don't just talk about that, jeez. We only really ever talked about that once. And not even anything all that heavy. She doesn't know hardly anything about that, in fact. I don't know why you get so weird about it whenever you find out I don't try to keep him a giant secret."

Diane makes a face and once again, resists the bait. She can be annoyingly single-minded sometimes. A trait I find admirable in my own self, incidentally.

"I can't believe you don't even know her name. Does she know yours?"

"Everyone knows mine. It's right there in my username."

"Well, what do you call her, when you address her directly?"

"I don't call her anything. It's just conversation. How many times have you addressed me directly by name in this conversation? None. It's just regular talking. You only say my name when you're getting all intense about trying to get something through to me. Because you think I don't know things. It's not like that with her. It's just, I don't know. It's just normal exchange."

"So, she's refusing to tell you? Did she say why?"

"She's not refusing. I never asked her, okay? It never, I never thought about it before."

Diane tilts her head in a disbelieving way, her eyebrows all crunched up. Like I just announced I never realized chairs were for sitting on or something. And there she goes with the clicker, silencing the television.

"You never asked her?"

I don't say anything. I feel sort of cornered and unsure. Is this something people are supposed to do? Should I have asked her? Is it weird I never even thought to ask her? That I never even wondered what her real name was? Maybe I've once again done some socially stupid thing by totally failing to seek that out. Am I just completely self-centered, to not have thought to ask? I know I have trouble with that sometimes. But it's not like all we do is talk about ME. I mean, I've asked her about some seriously personal stuff. Was it fucked-up that I didn't ask the basics? Did I do something socially retarded by never registering that I didn't know her name?

I know the names of the other people I feel connected with. Not just first names, either, in a lot of cases. How did that happen? Did I ask them? I don't think so. I think learning their first names just happened naturally, right at the beginning of being friends. I don't know if I've EVER come right out and asked someone point-blank what her real name was. In fact, now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure I feel a strong resistance to doing that. Is that weird?

Diane has a strange look on her face, some mixture of confused and disbelieving and annoyed.

"WHAT," I say, finally.

As usual, stupid Diane does not explain WHAT, just goes on to ask more questions, with longer and longer pauses between.

"Don't you think it's weird for her to know your name but you don't know hers?"

"Doesn't that feel strange?"

"How well do you know this person? What's her interest in you?"

I'm listening to her sounds more than her words. Something is shifting, from irritated and disbelieving into ... something else. Worried? Suspicious? We've already had a conversation, just a casual one, a day or so ago when I was actually on the computer talking with my friend and Diane was throwing questions at me in an offhand sort of way. She was a little smirky, even. Asking where my friend went to school and stuff. And by the way, somewhat annoyingly, my friend ALSO seemed rather amused by it, just like Sharon had been, and was even offering answers before Diane got the questions out. It's how intellectuals vet each other, I think is what she said.

But this conversation is different, or is becoming different. Diane's getting a serious sound in her voice. Any second now she's going to get therapist face.

"It didn't feel weird," I say slowly. "And I know her well enough to know she's okay. I mean, she's safe. I think her interest in me is because I'm interesting. And because she knows I'm okay, too."

Diane takes this in, then makes a little grimace, shakes her head.

"I'm also super nice," I add, puffing myself up a bit. I don't mention that in the course of a regular conversation, I'm apt to write *scowls* about seventeen times.

"It seems like a strange imbalance in power," is what she says. "In knowledge. It's such a basic thing. If she's okay, and she knows you're okay, why would she hide that from you? It's so ... fundamental."

"She's not hiding anything, dammit. It just never came up!"

"Well, don't you think it's weird it never came up? How can you feel close or connected to someone without knowing what to call her?"

I feel a little flare inside, at the top of my belly.

"You didn't know my real name at first," I say, knowing I'm doing the brat sound but not caring. "You only knew me by my street nickname. Sometimes even now you still call me Flinch. I didn't even tell you my last name until a couple years ago. Didn't seem to stop you from feeling close and connected enough to break all your work boundaries and take me home. Never stopped you from knowing I was safe enough to not read it the wrong way if you crawled up next to me in bed when I had nightmares and fell asleep doing your huggy shushy thing."

She has looked away, and I expect to see therapist face when she turns back. But it's not therapist face. It's worse. It's therapist face mixed with MOM face. And she's fucking smiling.

"That was different," she says. Her eyes are soft. Hazel-green now. There's an aching thing behind them.

"It wasn't."

"It was. That was a face-to-face thing. It's different in person. There are other things to read. And I had all the power. You were a child. You'd had everything taken from you. Holding onto your name was one of the few ways you could keep some power, a sense of control."

I don't know what to say to this. There's some truth in it.

"This thing, now," she goes on, "It's different. There's the same imbalance in power -- she's older than you, right?"

"She's fifty-seven," I lie. I told her this lie the other day, but she doesn't seem to have registered it. I actually have no idea how old my friend is. I'm not about to admit this, though. Somewhere between forty and seventy, I'm pretty sure. But I think if I make her older than Diane, maybe Diane will back off. She likes Sharon, after all. Sometimes even defers to her. Of course it backfires.

"Well there you go," she says, in a satisfied way. "The same imbalance in power --"

"You know, you're really hung up on the age thing," I say. "I think this must be coming out of all your menopausal dementia or something."

"-- only this time, she's the one holding a meaningful thing back, not you. You -- you're just your transparent, open self."

Goddammit. Usually the menopause thing gets her off the track.

"I like my open transparent self," I say. I feel defiant and sulky.

"Me too," she says, and smiles again, and she raises her hand to touch at my hair.

"Don't touch me, dammit," I say.

"Oh, honey,"

"And don't 'honey' me right now, either."

She pulls her hand back and tucks at her own hair instead. Why is she still smiling? For a second she looks like she's trying really hard to not start laughing. I want to smack her. Instead I lean back into the couch and cross my arms over my chest. Then her face eases and it's just a quiet look, serious, gentle.

"I just don't want you to get hurt," she says. "Or used, or mind-fucked, or taken advantage of."

"I'm done with this for now," is all I can get out. I feel like I might cry.

"I can see that. Just as well. It's time to clean up dinner anyhow."

Then she stands up and bends and starts gathering plates and things. I get up and help and I stop feeling the crying feeling but the whole thing bothers me just the same.

And has been bothering me. I don't mean the name thing, exactly. I mean the thing about my not feeling that it matters. It reminds me of my short-circuit for feeling shame. Like how I can talk about the dramatic bad things without feeling embarrassed or like it was somehow my fault. It feels like that. Like maybe I'm missing a basic feeling that other people have. Diane seemed so taken aback.

I don't mean "missing" in a way like, "Oh, I lament the loss of this!" I just mean it like ... like maybe it's another one of those things that most people do or feel as an ordinary thing and I don't do or feel it. I don't know.

And something else, too. Something about Diane not trusting me to have good instincts about people. Something about not wanting to put my friends in the position of having to provide answers to ease Diane's worries. Not wanting them in the middle of this. It's a strong feeling. I think so far I've been willing to ... I don't know. To maybe compromise something in some ways so I can give Diane information that will get her to back off. But now I'm feeling like it's time for us to hash this out.

So yeah.

So that's what I've been mulling.

Luckily, I pick the kinds of friends I can actually go to and ask about this sort of thing. My friend tells me it wasn't weird of me not to ask, because I was probably picking up vibes about how she's a very private person who doesn't share her name and I was just being respectful of that. That's comforting but I'm not so sure I was responding to any vibes. It honestly just didn't occur to me to have a curiosity.

Well. Maybe not having that curiosity was my way of respecting the vibe. Because we all know how curious I am in general about everything else. And I won't pretend I don't appreciate the power of names and naming. Just the other day I got irked at someone who was using an affectionate nickname when she talked with me. And it's true that always before with my closer connections, I like being able to think of the other person by the name she uses when she thinks of herself.

So yeah.

It's interesting. A bit confusing. And I can't figure out if I'm being weird or not. Ha. I didn't feel weird about not knowing my friend's name. But I might feel weird about not having felt weird.

This Is Not About Fruit

2011-12-30T10:59:00.000-05:00

Over the past couple weeks I've been getting to know a couple people in my game. I mean, I'm friendly with a lot of people, and there are a handful of people I tend to chat with on a regular basis, but --

OH speaking of chatting! I've been meaning to confess this for some time but ... the shame.

I finally broke down. I've been using, ah, well, okay: emoticons.

SHUT UP. There are just moments in real-time chatting when really the ONLY thing that's gonna work is one of those loathsome smiley face thingees.

I KNOW. Shut up. I know. I know what I've said, dammit! I'm eating the crow, okay? Or the dirt. Or the hat. Or my words. Whatever it is you're supposed to eat, I'm eating it. And swallowing my pride. Huh. Ever wonder why so many shame metaphors have to do with ingestion?

Well before I wander off into a total side road making connections to my pervert uncle, let me get back to the point of this entry, which, CRAP, also seems to circle back to him.

Anyhow lately I've been talking more in-depth with a couple people in my stupid game. And in the moving-from-mere-acquaintances-into-actual-friends-thing there always seems to come a point where you exchange some basic facts about yourselves, like, for example, where in the world you're located and what you do for a living and what your basic living situation is and roughly how old you are and what the most morally-complicated situation you've ever been in was. Hahaha just kidding. Although you'd be surprised at the sorts of first-date conversations I end up in.

Now I'm pretty good at navigating the how-old-are-you question; I just tell people to think of me as around twenty-ish and that seems to work well enough. And I don't mind people knowing I live on Cape Cod, so that's okay, too. But when we get to the basic living arrangements questions and the what you do for a living questions, I can't seem to figure out how to deal with those in a quick, easy way.

What do I say about my basic living situation? The minute I say anything about Diane, I need to clarify that even though I'm a lesbian, we're not partners. But I never know what to call her, because our relationship doesn't really fit any of the normal definitions. The minute I start trying to explain why our relationship doesn't fit the normal definitions, I end up in the middle of explaining how we met, which leads to dumpsters, then to being on the street, then back to why I was on the street and so on. And what I do for work. How do I offer something reasonable to these sorts of things that won't get us all mired down in long discussions about my bizarre past? One thing always leads to another.

I mean, I could be cagy about it all, but the whole POINT is that I like the person and want to connect, and I don't know how to be cagy and connecty at the same time, and frankly I don't want to learn how to be that way. I like my wide-open self, thanks. So what always ends up happening is this weird phase where it seems like the only thing we talk about is ME and my stupid weird history. And I try to keep it casual, because to me, it feels kind of matter-of-fact, and plus I've already told the entire world about every last thing on this blog, so it's not like I feel like I'm imparting and super intimate secrets about myself or anything. And it's not like I get jammed up sharing stuff. I mean, I enjoy that as much as anyone else, I think.

(Side note: Have you ever tried to explain to someone in your life who I am and why you bother with this blog? If so, was it possible to be forthright about the basics without getting all caught up in answering a bunch of questions about details? Were you able to say it in just a few sentences? What I'd like to hear is someone who pretended to be me with my story. What would she say? Remember, she's talking with someone she LIKES. Someone she wants to bond with, not alienate with evasions and half-truths.)

Anyhow the thing I'm trying to get at is I find myself feeling uncomfortable with how unbalanced the getting-to-know-you phase is. I do like talking about myself, but I want to know about the other person just as much, if not more. I've tried being the one who jumps in first with questions, but the thing about cool people is it's a give-and-take, and the minute I start giving my stuff the back-and-forth thing seems to grind to a halt and we spend all this time focusing on ME. Then what often happens is the other person feels kind of reluctant to share, because, well, I don't know. Sometimes people say stuff like, "My life is so boring compared to yours." Or worse, "My experiences seem so trivial in comparison."

Or the opposite thing happens. A number of times now people have responded by sharing personal stuff and then it's like, I don't know. Like they run away. Like they freaked themselves out or something by sharing stuff they don't usually share, or have never shared before, and that scares them, maybe? So they stop wanting to talk with me? I don't know. I'm not talking about in my game, here, by the way. I mean over the past few years. There have been a few times when this happened.

Well THIS entry is going to sputter out into a thing that trails off. Because LOOK! It's almost eleven in the morning and I haven't even logged into my game yet! I never even got to the fruit. I started this entry with the goal of talking about fruit. Dammit.

P.S. I KNOW you guys are gonna ignore all the heavy stuff and just tease me mercilessly about the emoticon thing. Which by the way I think is really only appropriate for instant messages and real-time chats. But I'm ready. Hit me with your best shot. BRING IT ON. Oh GOD I really want to put a smiley thing here but I can't; I just cant. Someone kill me now.

Season's Greetings!

2011-12-23T15:50:00.002-05:00

Remember Painted Coyote Woman? You know, splatter-painting She Who Cavorts in Many Colors? Well she appeared magically and without warning in the driveway last week and was here for two nights. She drove up in a car ("I got rid of the van," she said. "I'm sixty-four years old. I think it's time I stopped needing a way to run away from my life.") that was literally stuffed with seasonal things. I mean stuffed like the back seat was completely filled from seat to ceiling. Like little ribbony tufts were sticking out from where they had been caught between the door and the frame of the car.

At some point within moments of arriving, she looked around and mentioned, in a rather forced-sounding casual voice, that she noticed we have no decorations up. You could see her throughout the evening eyeballing the walls, like they were screaming to her for applications of the holiday spirit.

Then the next morning as Diane was getting ready for work, Appalled at Non-Festivity cornered me with a hopeful, hungry look on her face, wanting to know if we had any craft projects in the works. It was the look of a jonesing craft addict, is what it was. "Maybe you should decorate Siren's dead frogs," Diane yelled from her bedroom, because Diane has an uncanny ability to hear conversations from miles away, and also delights in torturing me. Apparently.

"Ooh," said She Who Says Ooh More Times Per Conversation Than Is Natural, "Dead frogs?"

Then Diane sashayed off, leaving me with this completely crazy person who was disguised as a harmless elf. She had an elf hat. I kid you not.

"What kind of decorations?"

"Well, I was thinking of maybe making a Santa hat or something."

"Ooh," she said. "We could crochet Santa hats!"

Seriously? Crochet? You know what is one thing I didn't learn while locked up in the basement with the sociopath? How to crochet. The closest thing I can do is ricochet. In a crotchety way. My crocheting up a Santa hat for a dead frog was not gonna happen unless it involved scowling and banging off of furniture.

Did we have any crocheting needles, she wanted to know. She described what a crocheting needle looks like and shockingly enough, we did have something that sounded about right. One of the odd things I'd scavenged from the hoarded house. I showed it to her and she frowned.

"Ooh," she said. "That IS a crocheting needle, but it's really tiny."

"Maybe it was for making lace?" I only knew this because I'd found it in a trunk full of, you guessed it, half-made lace.

"Ooh, tatting! Okay. How about red embroidery thread? Do you have any of that?"

"You're going to tat a hat from thread?"

Well, I got her the embroidery thread, but I knew in my heart she was doomed to failure, so I set about trying to find some red fuzzy material we could use. You know, just cut some material, glue it here and there into a hat shape, add some white fuzz. I found the white fuzz easily enough: Miro grudgingly donated several tails from her fluff mice. The red material was a bit harder, but then I remembered the perfect thing. Something I'd seen in the bottom of the basket where we keep the animal toys. We call it Lena's fluff molecule, but she never plays with it. She has like seventeen thousand stuffed toys. She'll never miss it.

Just don't tell Diane.

So we sat at the dining room table and worked on our different projects, hunched like little golems, which I don't know how to spell, each of us convinced she had the best method. And every so often I'd look over at She Who Squints While Concentrating and she'd be frowning and muttering as she fashioned a skinny piece of embroidery thread into what looked like a slightly less skinny piece of embroidery thread.

"I have lots of extra red fluff here," I said, but she just shook her head and complained a little about arthritis and tiny crocheting needles.

We each had a Bruce. I gave her Comic Sans Bruce to work with. Of course.

She Who Would Not Give up on Crocheting with the World's Smallest Crocheting Needle made a lot of clucking and sighing sounds, and every time I asked how it was going she would give some noninformative answer. Finally we just worked in silence. She got up a few times and went out to her car, or flitted here and there in the house, but I didn't pay much attention. I kind of get lost in things sometimes. I got lost in cutting and gluing and I even ended up doing a little sewing.

Shut up. It's festive.

And when I was done I plonked it on Bruce's head. It was a little big, a little stiff, a little lopsided, but I thought it didn't look half bad.

"Ooh, that's very good," she said, when I showed her. I realize now it was the kind of voice a mother uses with a child who offers up a macaroni picture.

"And how are you doing?" I asked in a generous way, thinking I could show her how to make a fluffy hat once she finally gave up on the crocheting thing. I mean, it looked to me like she was still working on the same thread.

"I'm making a scarf!" She said happily.

"A scarf? That's cool. Did you give up on the hat?"

"No, it's to go with the hat."

"You're gonna do the hat next?"

"No, I did the hat." Then she pointed.

"Wow," I said, once I had worked through my awe and envy and found my voice again. "You just totally crocheted the perfect hat."

"Yours is good, too! I think they'll both look great in the panorama."

"Panorama?"

Then she stood up and walked over to the shelf where the Bruces usually live and fussed a bit. I couldn't see what she was doing, because I was behind her, busy being dumbfounded and pissed I'd never learned to crochet a Santa hat in eleven seconds flat. Then she stepped away and made a little gesture with her hands, some cross between "Surprise!" and "Ta-da!"

"Holy Christmas shit," is what I said. Because I'm classy AND festive.

"I was a housewife in the seventies," she replied, like that explained everything.

And there you have it, Gentle Readers: I have been totally outclassed. Happy Holidays, dammit.

Screw Phobias: My Cat Is Hurting

2011-12-21T13:07:00.001-05:00

You know what breaks through my personal craziness with lightning speed? A kitty in pain. This morning I woke to the sounds of Miro making odd little yelpy meows. I got up and found her in the litter box, just squatting. She stopped meowing when she saw me. She just squatted and held still and looked up at me with an unhappy face. After a while she got out of the box and I looked and saw a bunch of separate clumps, just tiny pee clumps, a couple of which were topped by bloody little blobs.

This means only one thing: her cystitis is back. This is when crystals form in her urine and make it painful and difficult for her to pee. I can't imagine peeing sharp little rocks. The bloody blobs are shreds of irritated tissue from her urinary tract that scrape off when she passes the crystals. Ouch. My poor baby!

I didn't even bother with calling Diane. I just called the vet and left a message. Calling Diane would mean waiting until she's not in session, having HER call the vet, blah blah blah, a bunch of extra steps that would add hours to the amount of time my kitty is in pain. I called a couple hours ago and I'm still waiting to hear back. Usually what happens is the vet comes and gives Miro a shot of antibiotics, and within a day Miro is back to normal.

The long term cure for it all has been changing Miro's diet from canned food and dry kibble to an all-raw-food diet. It's been like a magical cure. But every so often she has a flare-up. The flare-ups seem to be stress-related. I think it's because we had the psycho cat Roz for such a long stretch. Maybe the dog, too. Miro is always on high alert when the dog is around, and when the psycho cat was here, I don't think Miro slept a wink. But who knows. That was a while ago now.

So anyhow, yeah. I hate the phone, but here I am anxiously willing it to ring so I can pounce on it and talk to someone I don't really know. So I can arrange for some STRANGER to come over and COME INSIDE MY HOUSE and stick needles in my cat. I can't WAIT for her to come over and be all up in our grills. What social anxiety? My cat is sick. I don't have time to be neurotic.

The good thing is this isn't like some life-threatening emergency or anything. The bad thing is my rotten useless cat is in for at least another day's worth of hurt and misery. I feel so helpless. I know she'll be fine, but I feel bad. Could I have caught it sooner? It seems to come on so fast. She did throw up twice yesterday. But I try to pay attention to her peeing habits. I remember feeling glad after the crazy cat left, thinking, well Miro got through that just dandy -- she's peeing like a little horse! Was she peeing weird yesterday? I don't think so. Is there anything more I can be doing? I've put fresh water down for her but she gets most of her liquid from the raw food, so she almost never drinks water. Has she been eating less lately? Does she look skinnier? Oh and forget about adding stuff to her food like tomato juice, cranberry juice, or any other crystal-fighting thing. All you have to do is THINK about messing with her food and she snubs it.

She's sitting on the desk beside my computer now. I have a towel there for her because she likes to be close by when I'm computing. She's purring really loudly. She just looked over at me and gave me a slow blink. In Miro-speak that counts as blowing me a kiss. Sometimes she breaks my heart, the little jerk.

Ellen, the Animals, and a Dash of Pervert Uncle

2011-12-09T17:47:00.003-05:00

So Ellen has this idea that maybe the times I have hard nights are happening according to a pattern, and not totally randomly like I thought. She has a very mathematical mind and a special gift for remembering complicated things and seeing patterns and relationships among things that look unconnected to us normal people. She's actually kind of Rain-mannish about it. Seriously! Like one time I rearranged the Bruce tchotchkes on a shelf into little clusters and I swear the next time she was here she took one look at it and was all, "Why do you have the dead frog stuff set up in a fibonacci sequence?" Which it was NOT meant to be: I had arranged them by type. She can look at an entire wall of books for two seconds and then close her eyes and you can ask her how many have titles that go horizontally instead of vertically and she KNOWS. She can tell you exactly how many different colors there are in any rug in this house. And it's not like she ever sat down with a magnifying glass to count. It's a little creepy. Sometimes I like to ask her these kinds of things just to reassure myself there are people in the world who are in fact weirder than me.

Anyhow I asked her to say more about this nightmare pattern thing and she won't. She says it's just an idea and she doesn't want to influence my subconscious into adhering to some sort of weird schedule just because I start believing there's a pattern.

I feel quite scowly about it although I suppose I can see her point. Seriously, though, a mathematically-minded social worker? Could my friends get any weirder?

And I have no idea what kind of pattern she's thinking of. Don't think I haven't tried tricking it out of her. The moon? My periods? I know it's not like anniversaries for shit that went down because it just doesn't happen like that. I mean ... it really seems random. Sometimes I'll go weeks without anything at all, and other times I'll have little spates of days where I'll have one or two a night. I mean, I'm not a fibonacci savant but I'm pretty good with patterns and data and all that myself. And I've looked for patterns. I just don't see any. I don't know. And it's a weird feeling knowing she's been kind of paying attention to it in the first place. I mean, she has a better idea of what dates I've had hard nights over the past couple years than I do.

I asked Diane about it on the phone last night and she knew exactly what I was talking about but she played the funeral card on me. Which means the two of them have been CONFERRING about this. Last night I went to sleep with nightmare performance anxiety. Hmph.

• • •

Earlier this evening I saw a fox in the yard! First time I've seen one since summer. I wonder where they go for the winter. I only saw it for a second so I have no idea which one it was.

• • •

I've pretty much taught the compass dog a new command. "Don't look at me." Why do dogs do that? She's been hanging out in the living room lately, which is where my computer is, and I swear, every time I turn to look at her, she's there LOOKING RIGHT BACK. With a totally expectant and hopeful face. WHY.

So I taught her to not look at me. Only you know what really happens? What really happens is she stares longingly at me UNTIL I TURN TO LOOK AT HER. Then she slides her eyes away and lies really still like maybe I'm an idiot and will think she's always had a particular worried fascination with that one blank spot on the wall. When she does this, her eyebrows twitch all over the place from the sheer effort of keeping herself from staring at me. I know she stares at me all the time because I could feel her eyes burning holes in my back. So I went and got a little hand mirror and sure enough, whenever she thinks I'm not looking at her she totally looks at me. What. Does. She. Want. Diane and Justine are coming back tomorrow morning and as annoying as it can be to share a house with Diane, I can't even tell you how thrilled I'll be to no longer be in charge of Lena the staring dog.

• • •

At least the psycho cat Roz and I have made friends, sort of. She's a really scary cat. Unlike Miro, who only THINKS she's really scary. Justine told Diane that even the vet is afraid of Roz. Roz has like seventy-nine extra toes and the kind of claws that grow too fast so Justine has to bring her in to the groomer's every three weeks to get them clipped. She said the groomers gear up like soldiers going into battle and it takes three of them to do it. And some weeks they can only get half of them done. I never knew there were cats who needed their claws clipped; I thought somehow they always took care of that themselves. But when Miro walks across the kitchen floor, you don't hear anything. When Roz does, she clacks.

Anyhow Roz sometimes comes over to me and wants me to pet her. Guess what! She's got this incredibly silky fur. It's, like, slippery or something. Miro feels like a sandpaper cat in comparison. I've learned I can only pet Roz once or twice and then no matter how much she begs, I shouldn't touch her again because she'll go after my hand with all five hundred and forty-three of her extra claws. It's completely nerve-wracking because the entire time she's rubbing on me and asking me to pet her, she's also kind of growling at me.

P.S. You can totally lecture a cat about mixed messages as much as you want and it doesn't do any good at all. Also, if you tell a cat not to look at you, it totally takes it as a challenge to a staring contest. Which you WILL lose.

• • •

I spend so much time playing my stupid game it's ridiculous. I'm finally starting to feel moments of being tired of it, though. I think that's a good sign. And I'm getting closer to the highest possible level. Maybe once I'm there I'll feel less need or desire to be, you know, getting there all the time. Over the past couple days, I've found myself kind of wanting to play MineCraft again. Of course what I really want to do is go into MineCraft and build a giant replica of one of the rare toys of the Glitch world. I know. There's something wrong with the way my brain works sometimes.

• • •

Speaking of my stupid game. Several different people, including one person I never even met before, have told me I've become rather well-known and well-liked in the game. I don't understand how this kind of thing happens. It happened at the funny-not-so-fun-anymore forum, too, which I actually understand a little better because there weren't many people there when I joined. But Glitch is a big game, with tens of thousands of players. Anyhow I think it's pretty funny how I can be popular in a game and such a social moron in real life. Sometimes I even have this weird sense of ... I don't know. Disconnect or something. I don't know the right word. But it happens when I think about my uncle. Not that I run around in this game world thinking about my uncle. But Ellen's been asking lots of questions about that so I guess it's been more in the front of my brain or something. Sometimes I do a double-take. Like I suddenly realize, this person thinks I'm just a regular person. I mean, I know I'm just a regular person. But I'm used to people knowing my history. So something happens in my thinking, like: This person does not look at me and also see the girl who held a ping-pong ball against the wall with her nose. That kind of thing. It's weird. Not bad. Just weird.

• • •

Oh look, it's been over an hour since I last played! Bye.

Ellen the Obnoxious

2011-12-02T13:56:00.000-05:00

Me (looking in freezer): Ooh, what's this? Is this a chicken pot pie? I love chicken pot pie! I know, let's have chicken pot pie tonight. I need a change of pace.

Ellen (disbelievingly): Seriously?

Me: Yeah! It's been turkey leftovers every night for like a WEEK here now and no offense to Diane's turkey-cooking skills but the novelty has kind of worn off. (pause) Is the thing. (pause) WHAT.

Ellen (slowly): So. In order to escape the monotony that is turkey, you want to have ... a chicken pot pie.

Me (thinking very hard): Well. When you put it that way I guess it does sound a little …

Ellen: Short-sighted?

Me: I hate you.

Diane the Old and Cranky

2011-11-30T08:05:00.002-05:00

So Diane's birthday is coming up and I don't have anything for her but it's okay because she's leaving tomorrow with Justine to go to the memorial service in Florida for Justine's mother. You know what that means: Ellen and I get to take care of Lena the compass dog and Roz the psychotic cat. Hooray! I'm already beside myself with anticipation. Justine is bringing the animals down this evening, and then she and Diane will go up to Justine's house so they don't have quite as long a drive to get to the airport in the morning.

Also, I'm not too worried about the birthday thing because could anyone be more unenthusiastic about turning fifty than ole Miz Thang? Plus the other day she arrived home with a brand new vacuum because she hates the upright vacuum, which I happen to love. Oh, we have battled over the (nonexistent) need for a canister vacuum. This is a small house, okay? There really isn't room for yet another vacuum. We already have the little carry-around vacuum, the one we've been using for sucking up flies. That one doesn't have an agitator head, she argues. So anyhow the other day she just arrived home with this giant box yelling, "Merry Christmas to me!" And I saw what it was and yelled, "Happy Birthday!" And that pretty much took care of the birthday/Christmas gift thing. We don't really make much of holidays, to tell the truth. One of the things about having money is you tend to just get the stuff you want when you want it, which can make seasonal or occasion-specific gift-giving sort of hard. Maybe I should make her a gift from my heart. I could make her a card out of macaroni shells or something. And then bleed on it so it would literally be from my heart. I bet she'd like that. What do you think?

Thanksgiving Recap: Pies, Flies, and Dead Things

2011-11-28T10:24:00.005-05:00

We had a nice Thanksgiving.

Look at my gorgeous pie! Do you think the boys who read this blog are snickering now? It was a masterpiece. And we're still enjoying it. I just had a slice for breakfast. Nothing like eating a little morning pie to start the day off right. Okay now I'm making myself snicker. I'm super mature.

Go ahead. Admire my pie. You know you want to.

I also ended up in charge of the mashed potatoes. Which has turned into yet ANOTHER culinary tradition. My mashing the potatoes, I mean. This started when Carolyn was sick and simply didn't have the energy. Then Diane latched onto it as some sort of proof that I'm learning to cook, which in turn means she's doing a proper job of teaching me the skills I'll need in order to live an independent life as a functioning adult. Okay whatever, be that as it may, I am the potato masher. And I make the BEST mashed potatoes. My secret involves leaving the skins on the potatoes, adding tons of crushed garlic, using sour cream instead of milk, and not mashing them into a textureless pulp. I'm not showing a picture of my mashed potatoes because you know what mashed potatoes look like no matter how good a picture you take? Malignant ice cream.

Somewhere in among the food preparations, Diane realized she'd thrown away the sticker on the turkey breast she'd bought for our dinner guest. Our dinner guest doesn't eat gluten, see, and there was no way we were gonna have an unstuffed turkey for Thanksgiving. Originally Diane was going to buy a whole extra turkey but I talked her down to a stuffable breast. Heh. Stuffable breast. Okay fine I have the humor of an adolescent boy. Anyhow there was a tense moment when Diane suddenly figured out she had no idea what the turkey breast weighed, and therefore had no idea when she should put it in the oven in order to time everything perfectly. Luckily, improvisation comes naturally to us chef types.

The occasional dog was visiting. Can you tell? Also: it weighed about six pounds.

In other news, we've been invaded by CLUSTER FLIES. It is GROSS. The only good thing about it is that they aren't from things being dirty or rotten or whatever. Our dinner guest kept trying to explain it by referencing this one time she had a million flies in her house and she found a rotting scallop on the floor under the stove. As fascinated as I was with the idea of a maggot-infested piece of rotting seafood, I was like, seriously? How could you not have noticed the smell of a rotting scallop? We do not have any rotten scallops, dammit.

Amityville Horror, Cape Cod style.

Apparently cluster flies come into houses to survive the winter, and on warm days they emerge from hibernation and because they are not very smart, having brains the size of weevils, they don't know how to get back outside, so they cluster at the windows. The most interesting thing about them is that they have no interest in the things flies usually like, such as people food. They eat worms. Or, the larvae do. The adult flies lay their eggs on earthworms and the eggs burrow down and then the developing maggots eat the worms alive from the inside out! It's almost as good as an episode of Parasites Ate My Brain, also known as Monsters Inside Me, on the Discovery Health Channel. Which reminds me. Have you ever noticed how much of the programming on that channel has nothing to do with health and everything to do with all the ways a person can get sick? I love the Discovery Health Channel.

Another weird thing about cluster flies is you shouldn't squash them. Much as I love to run around with the fly swatter, I'm not allowed to swat any of these flies. It's a terrible thing, because they're much slower and bigger than regular houseflies, so swatting them is usually totally easy and satisfying. The reason you can't squash them is it causes them to give off some special come-hither scent to attract even more flies. What you are supposed to do is vacuum them up. Or hire a professional to make you do totally inconvenient things while she toxifies your entire living environment.

So over the Thanksgiving holiday, Diane and I fell into a routine. She would announce where the flies were and I would come running with the insect spray and then she would vacuum up their little dying selves. It's not as fun to spray flies as it is to swat them. But it's pretty funny to watch Diane galloping around with a look on her face like an invading army, waving and jabbing the vacuum hose like a sword, with the little buzzing canister following along faithfully behind her like an enormous, obedient beetle.

At one point I said, "Argh, where are they all COMING from!" And Diane answered, "Maybe your dead frogs ordered takeout." Oh ha ha ha. Everyone's a comedian.

Speaking of dead frogs. Guess who suddenly got all interested in Bruce's Gloria Swanson hat and grumpily whacked poor little Bruce completely off the bookcase because I managed to get the feathery hat away from her before she stole it and carried it off to places unknown? Guess who thought it was hilarious to watch us moving the bookcases around in order to be able to reach our overlarge selves down into the crack between the back of the bookcase and the wall?

Smirking perptrator not shown.

Here's a hint. It's the one who doesn't look the least bit sorry or guilty in this picture. The one who looks like a giant, unapologetic, backwards comma.

Unapologetic doesn't even begin to cover it.

And before you say anything, no I do not know why we have two copies of that book "Mysteries of the Unexplained." Perhaps we were so mystified by the first lack of explanation that we sought a second opinion. Perhaps we have two copies just to mystify YOU. Perhaps it's a super-meta endless loop paradox whereby the possession of two completely unenlightening books instantiates the very subject matter of said books. And yes, we keep the cookbooks in the living room. Now you know why Diane's attempts to be a good cooking role model for me are doomed to fail.

Oh look! I haven't played my game for at least half an hour! Gotta go.

Things I Am Thankful For

2011-11-24T12:03:00.003-05:00

But first, how did I end up being in charge of the apple pie? Diane says it's a TRADITION now. I am the apple-pie-er. I don't understand how this happened.

It was going to be just the two of us, me and Diane, but then one of her friends who lives on the other side of town got unceremoniously dumped at the last minute from some Thanksgiving plans. I don't know the details but there will be three of us. Plus we also have Lena the compass dog and Roz the psychotic cat, since Justin is down in Florida doing Thanksgiving with her ailing father. Anyhow our plan today is to eat at around three so we can all throw ourselves into the inevitable turkey nap afterwards and then still have time to get up and maybe watch a movie or something.

Diane and I have been doing foody things ever since we got up this morning. I was prepping the apple pie stuff and found BUGS IN THE FLOUR! Little tiny bugs and they were MOVING. So I am thankful for Cumberland Farms.

I have a super helpful cat, for which I'm also very thankful.

This is not as interesting as that time I stuck my head inside the uncooked turkey.

I like to make sure at least one part of my body is touching all the important things.

Other things I'm thankful for, in no particular order:

family, friends, and my rotten useless cat
my online connections
blogging
getting out of a forum before it consumed my life
getting into a game that is now consuming my life
baby birds
baby foxes
dead frogs
purple hair dye
shoes that fit
earplugs
wart-removal potion
breathe-right nasal strips
the smell of low tide
shepherd's pie
my space heater
my heated mattress pad
rodent electrocution devices
pre-made pie crusts
narrow-ruled paper
and, as always, the letter E, without which this post wouldn't have been possible.

Up the Butt of Diane, Siren Style

2011-11-16T15:59:00.001-05:00

P.S. I know. Everything about that title is just SO WRONG.

So let's see. What's been happening since the last time I wrote? Just small things in my quiet life. Mostly I've been playing my game a lot. Like in a ridiculously addicted way. I'm lucky to have the kind of life where I can do that if I feel like it. It may be waning a bit, though.

Other than my obsessive game-playing, there hasn't been much action around here. Diane got her third colonoscopy, and we all got to hear every excruciating detail about every last thing, including how afterwards she was in this room with all these other patients with only curtains in between and it was a giant fart symphony. Because apparently they don't let you go home until you prove you can fart a lot. Diane is turning fifty soon but has been getting colonoscopies since her early forties because colon cancer runs in her family. She had more polyps this time but nothing scary. And of course she did NOT ask them to give her the polyps in a jar for me to keep on my desk. Because she doesn't understand the importance of such things and plus she's a giant queasy wuss.

But there were pictures at least.

Diane said I wasn't allowed to post pictures of her polyps for all the world to see, goddammit, but you guys aren't the whole world, are you? There's only a few hundred of you, a thousand at most when I'm posting all the time. I had to totally SNEAK taking these pictures of the pictures, by the way. She showed me the printouts and then took them right back but I'm an accomplished snoop and I know where she keeps stuff because she has a very organized filing system. Which means I don't even have to be that accomplished of a snoop, I guess. Okay fine, whatever.

Anyhow, I took her name off, so I figure it's okay to share just one itty bitty picture of a little polyp. I mean, it's not like anyone is going to stalk her as a result. Now I'm picturing people lurking around outside our house with printouts of Diane's polyp, making furtive comparisons.

I love how innards look like alien landscapes. I made a slight modification to help in case people are having trouble telling what part is the polyp. I had trouble. I was like, "Why is that one the polyp but not the other bumps? Is it more irritated than the others? They all look kind of red and irritated to me." And Diane was all, "Can we please stop discussing my polyps and give me the picture back now." That's when she snatched it away and went to go hide it. Anyhow below I have provided a helpful hint by which you can see the polyp is the irritated part of her bowel. Hahaha! God I love my jokes so much.

Oh and we had dinner guests last weekend. THREE OF THEM. I slunk in and out of conversations and people sure do talk about weird shit at dinner parties. Subjects ranged from: everyone's personal colonoscopy story, horrible things that have gone wrong with other people's colonoscopies, colon cancer, diverticulitis, somebody's sister who had her colon taken out and the doctors just stitched her intestines to her butthole and now she's fine, dead people, dying people, horrifying ways to find out someone you love is dead, horrifying ways other people you know have found out about the deaths of their loved ones, cremation, cremains, really inappropriate things you could do with cremains, dead pets, dead things in general, dead frogs, whether Maynard is as good a name for a dead frog as Bruce, and whether a befeathered dead frog looks more like Gloria Swanson or Josephine Baker. I don't know if you can guess at which point I joined the conversation.

In other news, for those of you who knew me back when I was 4'11" and weighed 80 pounds, you can stop thinking of me as a waif now. Because I am officially normal sized. That's right. I think I've finally stopped growing and I'm proud to announce I'm 5'6" and I weigh almost 120 pounds! Yay me! I don't know exactly when it happened but somewhere along the way I stopped looking like a refugee and started looking more like a normal girl. I have pretty much grown into my oversized head, too. So no more troll look, either. I mean unintentional troll look. I can still pull off a convincing troll face when the need arises. Which it DOES, shut up.

Okay I'm beginning to experience game withdrawal symptoms, bye.

I'm Such a Dork

2011-11-11T11:11:00.000-05:00

Okay, those of you who know me know I have to do this.

Happy 11:11 on 11/11/11!

I hereby solemnly recognize the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the eleventh year of the millennium.

No one will be able to say that again for another thousand years. Weird, huh?

Well, okay, I guess you could say it again tonight at 11:11 PM. But that's not quite the same, I don't think. Since really that's not the eleventh hour of the day, but the twenty-third hour. Not to get overly nerdy about it or anything.

Reason #313 Why I Am Not a Very Good Blogger

2011-11-03T16:01:00.000-04:00

Lots of times when I'm doing other things (like the past couple days I've been power-washing the front deck and walkway), I write entire blog posts in my head. Then I get back to the computer and lose interest, because after all I already composed it in my mind. Then I feel kind of annoyed at my readers for not knowing everything that's going on in my life.

Also, remember the hoarded house? Here are a couple more goodies, one of which is a minor mystery object.

First, here's a picture I found in an old photo album. I love this picture because most photographs from this era seem to show people standing around in stiff positions with pained smiles on their faces. You can tell these two were just sort of goofing off.

And here's the minor mystery thingee. With a real clothespin for size comparison. "Real" as opposed to the giant clothespin, which by the way continues to be one of my all-time favorite possessions.

P.S. Not a coke spoon.

And finally, in totally unrelated news, here is my ridiculous cat.

I am not ridiculous. Touch me and die.

Happy Brucey Halloween!

2011-10-31T18:42:00.000-04:00

One Example of Why I Love This Game

2011-10-28T09:41:00.002-04:00

So in this game I'm addicted to, Glitch, there's money. One aspect of the game is doing stuff to earn money so you can buy things like tools or supplies or devices for carrying or storing your stuff. One of the most important purchases you make is your house. Here's my house:

Of course in real life there would be no welcome mat.

There are different styles of houses. Like treehouses and caves and these sort of pod-looking things. I chose my house because it looked like a house and because it was one of the only ones I could find that was a prime number. You can tell my decision-making process is totally logic-driven.

That's my Glitch there with the purple hair and the lab coat. I had to give myself girly lips because people kept mistaking me for a dude. Apparently I talk like a dude, plus maybe people have preconceptions about who gets to wear lab coats in our society. I don't know. It seems to happen pretty regularly, though, even with the girly lips. My name in the game is Sirentist so the lab coat made sense. I tried to use Siren but someone else had already taken it. That person seems to have signed up mere hours before me and then played for an hour or so before totally abandoning her account. Her name isn't even Siren. Do I sound resentful? I'm a little resentful.

You can also buy totally useless stuff just because it's fun or funny. You can buy (or make) a powder that causes everyone around you to sneeze little green beans. You can buy little wind-up toys and race them against your friends' toys. And of course, if you own a house, you can buy a gnome for your front yard.

Lots of houses on my street have gnomes. Here's the house right next door:

I like how in this shot I'm making skinny eyes at the gnome.

And here's one down the street in the other direction:

Hey! How come this house gets to not have a welcome mat?

A gnome isn't exactly cheap. One gnome costs two thousand bucks. Well, okay, in the game each unit of money is actually called a "currant." Currants don't actually look much like currants; they mostly just look like little brown coins with a modified cent-mark on them. But I'm going to call them bucks because I feel ridiculous calling them currants when talking with people who don't play the game. You have to admire the play on "currency," though.

So anyhow, yeah, a gnome is 2,000 bucks. A house, meanwhile, can cost anywhere from 1,500 bucks for a little apartment to 50,000 bucks for a multi-floored mansion. Mine was 15,000. At this point, I could afford to put a gnome in front of my house but I think they're kind of tacky. If there were an option to shell out 2,000 bucks for a pink flamingo, though, I'd be all over that. Because pink flamingos are super classy.

Did I mention the gnomes also say stuff when you walk by? You can program your gnome to say whatever you want, and anyone walking by will trigger it to produce a little speech bubble.

You're not limited to just one gnome, either. You can put as many as you like.

I bet the back yard is full of stray cats and broken lawnmowers.

Here's the best thing, though. I love this person for taking it all to the most ridiculous extreme possible. This house is just one block over from mine. I have to go out of my way to walk past it but it's worth it.

Holy crap, it's a gnarmy!

And that's just one example of why I'm so into this game. Because it's full of things that make me laugh.

Cross-Pawed Cat

2011-10-26T11:16:00.000-04:00

When my cat is not busy rolling around upside down, tearing maniacally from one end of the house to the other, or jamming herself into weird places, we often find her perched somewhere in a very dignified pose that involves daintily-crossed front paws.

Her favorite place to sit this way is on the arm of the couch:

I skinny one eye at you. You take too many pictures. No you may not touch my adorable toes.

But you can sometimes find her crossing her paws during other activities as well, such as while guarding valuables:

The pencils. They are mine. If you must make art, I suggest you paint with your own blood.

Or while holding down papers:

You can finish paying bills when I'm done with my nap.

Or while napping in the sun, sort of:

One does not always want to put one's entire self into the fluffy bag. Also, your shoe annoys me.

Or, as shown here in one of my all-time favorite pictures, while hiding:

I am invisible. I am a ninja. Touch me and die.

Sometimes, though, it seems the paw-crossing process goes somehow awry, resulting in a pose that is no longer dignified:

You know nothing of dignity. I'm totally doing this on purpose for reasons you can't understand.

And by the way. It's not "crossed paws." It's "cross paws." They are my angry paws.

In other news, as I explained in a comment on my last post, Diane is not coming home today as planned. She'll be back Saturday morning. Am I ready to not be a dog owner? Yes. Yes I am.

Of Course Only My Nerd/Geek Friends Will Appreciate This, But I'm Okay with That.

2011-10-24T00:20:00.006-04:00

I was transferring pictures from my camera and I came across this, which I totally forgot to post. It's the receipt from our last fried clams of the season. PJ's is a Cape Cod institution and we try to get their clams at least a couple times a summer. I was actually there when the cash register person handed the receipt to Diane and I was like, "OH MY GOD WE HAVE TO KEEP THIS." And Diane was all, "Why?" Because you are supposed to trade it in for your meal. And I said, "Look at what number we are!" And she gave me a blank look so I said, "JUST TRUST ME." By the way that is my melodramatic voice right there, not me screaming. In fact I was trying to be melodramatically quiet and inconspicuous because I didn't want to draw attention to the fact that we were absconding with the receipt instead of trading it in.

Anyhow, what can I say? I live an uneventful life. It doesn't take much to amuse me.

Dog Torturing and Bad-Mouthing Diane

2011-10-21T10:34:00.000-04:00

In the comments on yesterday's post, Paula advised me to not torture the dog much while Diane and Justine are away. Which is funny because I actually HAVE been torturing the dog. But it's FOR HER OWN GOOD.

I read somewhere that one thing you can do if you have a dog whose legs keep slipping out from under her is you can trim the fur that grows on the bottom of her feet, in between all those paw-pad thingees. This gives the dog more traction because there's not a layer of fur between the pad thingees and the floor. Lena the compass dog definitely has a traction problem. You can watch her just standing in the kitchen, not even doing anything, and see her back feet slowly sliding out from under her. I've suggested cutting the paw-pad fur before and Diane gets all jammed up over it because, as she put it, "Lena does not like to have her feet touched." So I figured I'd tackle this while Diane's away and thus unable to rush in like a protective grizzly and screw up the entire process and emotionally traumatize the dog for life. Which, by the way, is insanely easy to do.

Well, saying Lena doesn't like to have her feet touched is totally the understatement of the year because great jumping jehoshaphat, you never saw such a melodramatic dog. That dog quivered and whined and frantically licked my hands (EWWWW) before I ever even got out the little scissors. You'd have thought I was pulling her nails out with pliers in order to make dog-claw soup or something. I had to spend an entire day going in and out of the bedroom every hour or so just to sit there and hold/pet her feet before she was calm enough about it to let me actually cut the fur. And even then, it took about ten different fur-cutting sessions, during which she would quiver and jerk and roll her eyes around like a freaked-out horse the entire time.

And that's just the back paws. She's even more panicky about anyone touching her front paws. Also they are closer to her mouth which means about thirteen times more licking. Ew. I do not like the lickage. I did quickly realize I needed to wear a sweatshirt so she could only get at my hands. The first time, she slobbered all up and down my arms and I had to take a shower afterwards. No offense, dog people, but dog spit is nasty. It stuck to me like some weird glue and it SMELLED. I absolutely don't understand how Diane can put her head all up in Lena's and let Lena smear spit all over her face.

Okay anyhow, yeah. So I have until Wednesday to coax the hysterical dog into letting me trim her front paws. We'll see how far I get with that. I don't know if I've ever mentioned this before, but I am not a dog person. I'm always afraid to say anything about the dog because all the dog people come galloping over to say SEE YOU REALLY DO LOVE DOGS! When really what it is in this situation is I'm a decent person who doesn't believe in sitting around not helping a suffering animal when there's something I can do to make a difference. I care about Lena in a proxy sort of way, because she's so important to Diane.

It's interesting though. I think Lena knows that our relationship is a cool one of civility and courteousness rather than frantic hyper-dependent soulmate love or whatever. And you should see the difference in her behavior when it's just the two of us, versus when Diane is around. If you only ever saw her with Diane, you'd think Lena was the most pathetic, clingy, terrified, spastic, demanding, obnoxious, ill-trained dog on the planet. But when Diane isn't around, and as long as it's not meal-time or two hours within Lena's idea of when meal-time should be, she's actually not completely intolerable. And she doesn't seem as stressed out.

Like, for example, without Diane here, she's now able to go up and down her ramp to the bed with absolutely no fuss whatsoever. It's a huge production when Diane's around, because Diane is always trying to hug her and comfort her and sort of shove her up the ramp at the same time, and Lena is so busy freaking out about Diane's histrionics that she just locks her legs and digs her feet in (even without traction) and starts to cry. Then Diane gets offended that Lena is acting so abused and eventually she gets the impatient sound in her voice ("Come ON, Lena, it's just a ramp!"), which of course makes Lena even more scared, blah blah blah. I can't even be in the vicinity when this is going on because it really does end up seeming like a kind of dog torture.

But if you just let Lena do it herself when she's good and ready, she just trots up the thing like a pro. Well, okay, she's better at getting down than going up, but she gets up just fine. And you don't even have to wait for her to be good and ready. You can tell her to get up on the bed and if you just stand back and say a couple of encouraging things without making it into a giant scene, she'll do it no problem. Sometimes if I'm in the other room and she wants to get on the bed, she'll bark in order to have me come stand nearby and say, "Yep, you can do it." But even that has chilled out. Like, she'll bark once and I'll yell, "Good girl, go for it!" And then I'll hear the jingly collar as she does it just fine.

Wow now that I think about it, I think the most annoying thing about the dog might be Diane.

Speaking of Diane. Oh and how awful of me to be bad-mouthing Diane when she's out of town being all grief-stricken and such. But anyhow I haven't heard from her yet today. For the rest of the time she and Justine are in Florida, they'll be dealing with various death arrangements and also teaching the husband (now 90) to do things for himself that his wife used to do. Like ordering his own dinner every night. Did I mention the dead friend was old? She even ordered his dinner the morning of the day she died. They're not totally clear on what she died of, probably cancer. She was like Diane's surrogate mother. Okay I'm all over the place today with this writing. Sorry. I have to go play Glitch now, bye.

Sometimes No Matter How Hard You Try

2011-10-20T18:37:00.000-04:00

As I said Tuesday, Diane and Justine were scrambling to fly down to Florida in order to see Diane's friend (who is Justine's mother) one last time. I didn't bother explaining all this yesterday but there ended up being major screw-ups with their flights and they weren't able to fly out of Boston until very early this morning. They were due to arrive in Florida around five this evening. Diane just called a few minutes ago. Her friend died two hours before the plane landed.

Why I Have Been Scarce (Not Counting My New Game Addiction)

2011-10-18T18:33:00.002-04:00

We've been having some drama around here lately, which as you know I don't deal well with. The basic idea is a dear friend of Diane's is rather suddenly dying. She's been unwell for a couple months but just the other day it became clear she has one foot in the grave and there are not going to be any miraculous recoveries. This friend lives in Florida and is the mother of Justine -- remember Justine? The compass dog's official person? Basically what this means is both Diane and Justine are flying down to Florida tonight and will be there until Wednesday of next week. Which means Ellen will be staying here along with Lena the dying compass dog and Roz the scary maniacal and very alive vicious cat.

So pardon me while I completely gloss over Diane's grief and the unfairness of people dying and jump straight to the part where it affects ME and jams me up because I am so oversensitive to chaos in my environment. I'm trying to be all mature about things but really I just don't respond well to sudden changes in my routine. No one knew until about half an hour ago that all this needed to happen NOW NOW NOW. It's no one's fault, can't be helped, and obviously my sense of being off-kilter is the least of anyone's worries, including my own.

Anyhow Diane just left, and Ellen will be arriving later tonight with Justine's animals. Miro is stalking around all flat-headed and I'm twitching and flinching at the slightest provocation, sometimes at no provocation at all. The air feels tense and buzzy. Death sucks.

Oh and I sure hope that compass dog doesn't pick this week to croak.

Meanwhile here is a recent Bruce picture that for some reason cracks me up every time I look at it. I'm sure they're saying hilarious things to each other but I'm too distracted to pay attention. Maybe you guys will have better luck.

Siren's Big Adventure, Part III

2011-10-13T10:32:00.000-04:00

Do you like how I can draw a five-hour story out over a whole week? What can I say. Every time I get on the computer that Glitch game calls to me. Let's hope I work through this addiction soon so I can get back to real life business like blogging and commenting and emailing and all that.

The last thing I have to tell about my museum adventure is about the ride home. Which was very exciting because we drove past the Halloween House on Route Six. The people who own this house go all out every year with the Halloween decorations. When we saw it, the display wasn't finished yet, but it's still pretty awesome. Their front yard is just packed with all these life-sized figures arranged into little scenes, each of which tells a story.

I think this one will be some kind of bar scene:

We are dying for a drink here.

Not making a Grateful Dead joke here. Not even thinking about it. I love that the drummer is drumming with someone's arm bones:

Why does everyone keep offering us ice cream?

Eternal love, for better or worse:

"Until death do us part" turns out to be a complicated issue for reanimated corpses.

Halloween is not complete without a creepy hag:

My invisible crystal ball says you will be scammed by a three-fingered fortune teller.

This is why you don't hire zombies to work at the front desk:

Ignore the dead pirate hooker behind me. Sign the guest book or die.

What I want to know, though, is where do they keep all this stuff the rest of the year? I mean, the house itself isn't that big. I have these visions of all these grotesque figures positioned everywhere inside. That would be so cool.

And there you have it. My big day out. Which I am only just now feeling entirely recovered from.

In other news, remember Lena the compass dog? Well, she's not doing so well. Last weekend when she was here, her back legs kept wobbling and even occasionally folding under her. We use a complicated ramp system now to get her in and out of the car and up and down off Diane's bed. The problem is Lena's kind of terrified of the ramp, and if you touch her at all to try to help her she totally spazzes out. And it's sad, too, because you can tell she still has a puppy spirit in there. Like, we'll take her outside to pee and she'll grab a tennis ball or a frisbee or something and then prance around all hopeful, asking you to throw it. But you can't, because she gets so overexcited trying to chase it that she ends up hurting herself. Diane's heartbroken.

In still other news, and to end on not such a depressing note, the other night Ellen called us because she had a screech owl in her yard. So Diane and I huddled around the phone and listened and we heard the owl! Sounding just like a little whistling horse. It was really neat.

Okay I have to get back to my game now. It's been at least an hour since I played and I'm getting the shakes.

Siren's Big Adventure, Part II

2011-10-10T21:13:00.001-04:00

The other exciting thing that happened on our Boston excursion is we went through a tunnel! I LOVED the tunnel. Because I am five.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. That was on our way out of the city. Okay, okay. You want to hear about the museum itself. Well first there's this rule. If you're an unaccompanied adult, you have to show picture ID. How awesome is that? If you have a little kid with you, no problem. Much to my delight, the museum people required Diane and Ellen to show their IDs. I OFFICIALLY NO LONGER LOOK LIKE A MUTANT TEN-YEAR-OLD. Hooray for museums!

Honestly, though, the museum wasn't the highlight of my day. It was full of noes. Which is the plural of "no." For example, there were these two poor little turtles in a horrible featureless pool and NO, I was not allowed to rescue them and take them home and name them Bruce and Bruce. And the dollhouses were all sealed up behind glass so NO, I couldn't play with anything. And most disappointingly, there was an awesome giant thing that NO, I was not allowed to climb on because I am TOO BIG.

Okay, even so, the dollhouse exhibit was pretty neat, even if everything was behind stupid glass. I took pictures of my favorite things.

Why do all the people look like corpses? But look at the little bell! I love the little bell. Okay, compared to the scale here, it would be a giant bell, I guess. If you want to get technical.

Ignore the creepy wild-haired corpse with some weird skin condition. Why is her face pink and her arm pure white? Ignore her and look at the teeny candles!

The absolute best thing in this whole room was the tiny glass knob on the bedside cupboard thing. HOW DID SOMEONE MAKE A GLASS KNOB SO SMALL.

I love the molding around this window.

Those pan thingees hanging on the wall. I WANT THE FISH.

And finally, the absolute best thing in the whole entire house? THE WORKING MINIATURE LIGHT SWITCH. It was impossible to get a really good picture of it because the hallway was only three inches wide and I couldn't angle the camera the right way. What with the bulletproof glass and all.

So yeah, that was the dollhouse. It was cool. I'm glad I saw it.

More importantly, however, did you get enough of those giant bridge gears? I didn't think so. On the walk back to the car I took more pictures.

Oooh, and here's the tunnel again! This is when I yelled, "LOOK! There really is a light at the end of the tunnel!" And everyone in the car GROANED. Seriously. No one appreciates me.

I have more to tell you about the ride home, which really, the best parts of the entire day happened in the car, but I have to get back to playing Glitch now. What addictive personality?

Siren's Big Adventure, Part I

2011-10-07T12:17:00.007-04:00

We went to the Children's Museum yesterday and I took way too many pictures to fit in one post so I'll just tell you the important things for now. Plus I'm still recuperating from all the activity and the heart-attack-inducing experience that is driving in Boston with Ellen at the wheel.

Ellen is one of those Masshole Boston drivers. She honks and flicks her lights and makes exasperated hand gestures the minute any other car on the road does anything like try to merge, try to unmerge, try to turn, decide not to turn, or, god forbid, slow down. She zips in and out of traffic like a ballerina ninja and seems to view taxi cabs and pedestrians and people on bikes as rivals in some sort of elaborate life-or-death competition.

"I've never seen this side of you," I said.

"I used to be a courier downtown," she replied in a self-congratulatory tone.

On the way to the museum we drove past the Rainbow Swash, which is a famous controversial painting on the side of a giant gas storage tank. If you look hard enough, you can see a profile in the blue stripe.

"It looks like a woman with a beard," I said.

"It's Hoochieman," Diane said. She was in the back seat and I couldn't hear her very well, what with Aqualung playing full blast and Ellen providing additional flute enhancement sounds while beeping at people and leaning out the window to holler, "A blinker would've been nice, buddy!"

"Who's Hoochieman?"

Whereupon both of them made disgusted noises and Diane said I need to brush up on my American history.

Once they stopped making fun of me I got the story. The controversy about the painting is that the artist who painted it did so during the Viet Nam War, and some people say she painted the profile of Ho Chi Minh on purpose as a kind of protest. The artist herself, however, has always denied that she intended any such thing. I still don't know who Ho Chi Minh was (yet) but I'm guessing she was either a notorious bad guy or a notorious good guy in Viet Nam during the war.

When we got to the general area, the little dashboard lady started trying to boss Ellen around and she got snippy and turned it off. Whereupon Diane got out her iPhone to look up directions with some map program and every time she said anything Ellen would snort and say she knew a better way.

"That's not the way the app says we should go," Diane would say. And Ellen would roll her eyes and say something like, "Does the app factor in the tent city protest, huh? Did the app used to drive this route every day for years to get to its office? Has the app been navigating the Greater Boston Area since it was fifteen years old and had a learner's permit? I didn't think so. Tell the app to mind its own business while I deliver us to the museum."

So we trusted her and to her credit, she only took one wrong turn ("Well, gimme a break; I haven't been here in about twenty years") and we ended up in some kind of complicated maze of streets going over and under and in circles and then she knew where to go and we parked in a cave under some giant buildings and went up in an elevator and then through revolving doors (which were kind of unnerving) and then we were on the street. You can't park at the museum itself. So we parked a couple blocks away and walked.

Oh, look, cityscapes:

On the way, we had to walk over a bridge street and it was the coolest thing because it had all these giant gears everywhere. I don't know if it was a drawbridge or what but those gears were awesome.

The bridge went over water and I loved how the bricks looked.

"You do know we came all this way to actually look at stuff in the MUSEUM, right?" That was Diane, who was also feeling her back-in-the-city heritage and thus was displaying impatience everywhere.

Then we were at the museum and how much did I want to climb up inside the oversized Hood bottle? Which houses an Au Bon Pain rather than a dairy farm, much to my disappointment.

I turned around to take a picture of the skyscrapers again because I think the architecture is so cool.

See that white building on the left? That's the one we parked under.

My favorite part of this picture is yawning dude.

Oh look, it's nap time. And I haven't even gotten to the actual museum part yet.

My Numb Pinky Is Not a Euphemism

2011-10-05T12:15:00.002-04:00

Well guess who is now caffeine-free and no longer near death over it? Yesterday I only had one can of Diet Pepsi and today I've had none and so far no headache. I feel almost human again. So hooray! AND THE FOOT TWITCHES HAVE STOPPED.

Maybe it was totally psychological, that twitch thing, but I'm just happy they're not happening anymore. That withdrawal business was AWFUL, but the twitches were worse, so it's all good now.

In other news, we're going up to stay at Ellen's tonight and then tomorrow the three of us are going to see the dollhouse exhibit at the Children's Museum. I wonder if they let you take pictures in museums? I've never been to a museum before. Diane promises me we can make a beeline for the exhibit and then turn right around and walk out if it feels too overwhelming. We're not going to the museum to actually DO THE MUSEUM, she says. We're going to look at the dollhouses. Okay, but still, I'm kind of feeling like I'd rather stick a red hot poker in my eye, to tell the truth. Never mind how much I hate going places; the idea of being crowded by children creeps me out. I do love miniatures, though. Well, I love all inappropriately-sized things. Like my giant clothespin. But miniatures are cool. Hm. I guess you could say children are miniature people, huh. Okay, not all miniatures are cool.

In still other news, today for the first time I had to turn the heat on. A little while ago I was sitting here playing my new game -- have I mentioned I'm totally addicted to it? -- and I realized I was freezing. Like, my left pinky was totally numb. So I guess fall is here. I love the warm weather of summer but fall is awesome because it means the summer people go away.

I'm still chilled. My pinky is still numb. It's naptime. One thing about not drinking five cans of Pepsi per day: I feel kind of draggy. I'm going to go turn my heated mattress pad on. My rotten useless cat is already on the bed with an expectant face. Life is good.

Your uncaffeinated, child-hating friend,

Siren

P.S. The idea of a beeline being a straight line has always bothered me. Have you ever actually WATCHED a bee? A bee is like, "Oh, look, a flower! Oh wait, how about this one? No, look, there's a better one over there! Hey, what's that pink thing? Is that a giant flower? Oh, no, it's a plastic bucket. Wait, is that a flower over there?" I've never seen a bee go anywhere in a straight line.

Floor Eyeballs and Monkey Butts

2011-10-04T09:05:00.000-04:00

Since my last entry I have been completely miserable and whiny and useless. Apparently I haven't quite figured out the correct balance yet to this whole weaning-myself-off-caffeine business. Plus Saturday saw the beginning of shark week down in the lady parts, so between headaches and cramps and bleeding like a slaughtered cow, I couldn't get my brain to manage anything other than a flat line. I've fallen behind on the one blog I actually read every day. The only moves I could figure out in Scrabble seemed to involve swapping my tiles. (This means if I'm playing a Scrabble game with you and you're winning, it's totally unfair and it totally doesn't count because it would be like winning a game against someone who has just suffered a catastrophic head injury while in the middle of being attacked by lady-part sharks, so there.) The only thing I could cope with was playing Glitch, which I did obsessively. In Glitch, you can set yourself up to learn a skill and it just happens without your even trying. You can feel super smart even when you're being a pathetic moron in real life.

I'm still stupid today, although I don't feel quite as horrible. So in lieu of actually saying anything meaningful, I thought I'd show you a picture of my floor.

No, seriously. I have a FLOOR EYEBALL. This eyeball is in my room, between the bed and the door. It's pretty much the first thing I see every morning when I get up.

Want a close-up? I thought you might.

Wow there are a lot of scratches on my floor. Anyhow, yeah. Meet my floor eyeball. My feelings about my floor eyeball vary depending on what kind of mood I'm in. I usually try not to step on it.

OH, wait. I have another completely stupid thing to show you, too. Remember when June posted a picture of Miro's freakishly large bunghole? I discovered all you have to do is stick two little googly eyes on her butt and suddenly you have a perfect monkey face. Miro's butt, that is. Not June's. I don't know what you get when you stick googly eyes on June's butt. Oh great. Why do I have to have such a visual brain? Sometimes I kind of creep myself out.

My Kicking Foot, and, Really? Masturbation?

2011-10-01T12:45:00.003-04:00

Well, the other day I finally got my game acceptance letter and logged on to play the Glitch game. So far I like it enough to keep playing, but I'm not having the same experience I had when I started playing Minecraft. Which was that I logged into the game and immediately spent like eleven hours in a row playing and thinking every single thing was totally cool. That isn't even an exaggeration, I swear.

At the moment my biggest complaint about Glitch is that it seems kind of laggy. Plus there are zillions of other people everywhere, which means I often end up feeling kind of crowded. But so far it's been a decent amount of fun. I could still take it or leave it at this point.

In other news, let me tell you about my kicky foot. For a few months now I've been having these weird twitches when I try to go to sleep. At first it was just occasional, but over the past month it's gotten to be an every-night, every-nap thing. Not your regular, oh-I'm-falling-asleep twitches that you can kind of just feel and then move on to falling asleep. These ones are very specific to my feet, and it's one foot or the other -- like, most of the time it's my right foot, but every so often there will be a night where it's my left foot instead -- and it happens just as I'm really starting to go under: my foot will kick. Not a huge kick, just a little twitch upwards. I usually fall asleep on my side with my feet stacked on top of each other, and what happens is my right foot just sort of taps the bottom of my left foot.

And it wakes me ALL THE WAY up. I'll be just going under, in that lovely place where you can feel sleep tugging you and you don't even know it until something interrupts it and you feel yourself telescoping back up to wakefulness. It's the worst feeling, realizing you JUST MISSED falling asleep. That you KICKED YOURSELF AWAKE. And then I think, okay, it's not gonna happen again, and then I feel cranky and have to settle down emotionally to start to fall asleep and it happens again. Over and over. To the point where I'm wide awake at three in the morning, practically crying from frustration.

I figured it was some kind of muscular thing, right? So I tried massaging my calves. I tried getting up and walking around. I tried doing various leg-stretches before bed. I tried eating bananas and taking vitamins in case it was some kind of dietary-based muscular thing. I tried sleeping in different positions. I tried doing those stress-relieving exercises, like where you tighten all your muscles and then breathe the tension out and all that. No dice. I even tried masturbating, thinking, well, if you're after the tense-your-muscles-then-relax-them thing, why mess around with wimpy little relaxation exercises when you can go for the big enchilada of tension-cum-relaxation? Hahaha, I said "cum."

Well guess what takes ALL THE FUN out of masturbating. I mean, I don't even get the masturbatory urge all that often to begin with. Maybe I'm abnormal this way, since teenagers are supposed to be so sexually and hormonally overwrought, but I'm just not the kind of person who can put "masturbate" on my todo list of scheduled bedtime activities and then magically be in the mood at midnight when I finally turn the light off and start trying to go to sleep. What I want to do at midnight is START FALLING ASLEEP, not get all revved up. And forget about using it as a last resort, because what is the thing that simply does NOT occur to you when you've just resurfaced for the third time and are lying there all pissed off at your own damn foot? Your brain just doesn't jump to, "I know, I'll PLEASURE MYSELF!" Masturbation is supposed to be fun. It isn't supposed to be a chore. You're not supposed to be lying there thinking, "Goddammit, don't tell me I have to fucking masturbate so my spastic foot won't keep me up all night." I've heard people say masturbation is one way to cure menstrual cramps, and I have the same problem with that. If I'm curled in the fetal position with pain radiating out from my special place, the last thing I want to do is start messing around down there. Just give me the damn naproxen already. Okay I don't know how I've launched into a treatise on masturbation here. Let's just say it quickly became obvious to me that masturbation was not going to be the way to deal with my weird foot twitches, okay? Now get me out of this paragraph.

Anyhow. One night I actually ended up punching my leg a couple times out of pure frustrated desperation. That hurt. Then I felt stupid and that's when I realized, okay, there's a reason this is happening and it's not muscular or whatever because it goes back and forth between my feet. It has something to do with my nervous system not knowing how to shut down gracefully. The answer to this is not for me to sit here practicing self-abuse. In any form.

So I went online and did a bunch of research and pretty much the number one thing to focus on is how you might be overstimulating your own nervous system. Well. I drink a lot of caffeine. Like probably around five of those little cans of Diet Pepsi a day. I open a can right after I get up and I take one to bed at night at put it on my windowsill. I ALWAYS have a little Pepsi going. I open a new can as I'm throwing the empty away. I'm a chain-drinker. Hi, I'm Siren and I'm a caffeineaholic.

And FINALLY I am getting to the point here, which is that the past few days I've been trying to wean myself off caffeine. Right now my main technique is to switch between Pepsi and something else. Like, every time I finish a can of Pepsi, then I have to drink something else before moving on to the next Pepsi. It can be anything: a little bottle of CranGrape or Gatorade or even, UGH, WATER. (Dehydration can also cause twitchiness.) It has to be a whole bottle's worth, though, and I have to finish the whole thing. The idea is that by substituting every other can of Pepsi with something else, I'll end up cutting my caffeine intake in half. Except for the part where I'm probably drinking MORE drinks per day because I always want to hurry up through the stupid drink so I can get back to the Pepsi. So maybe I'm only cutting it down a third. Whatever.

And maybe, just maybe, it might be helping the twitchy thing. Like, I've been able to fall asleep the past two nights without these long melodramatic leg-punching twitch events.

BUT.

OH MY GOD THE CAFFEINE WITHDRAWAL HEADACHES. I mean, it's worth it. I'd rather be dealing with headaches than the fucking spazzy foot thing. But still. I am a little miserable.

Yeah, That IS a Glitch

2011-09-28T11:13:00.000-04:00

So last night I heard about this new game called Glitch. It's some kind of game where you go online to this virtual world and you, uh, do stuff, and you can interact with other players and develop skills and create stuff and, uh, okay. I'm not really sure what the game is about. Apparently you have to play it for awhile before it becomes clear what you're trying to do. And you define your own goals. Like, it's not linear. Or something. But its makers are billing it as a non-violent game. Like, the point is NOT to run around killing other people. Seems like maybe it's at least partly about community and friendliness and having fun. Most importantly, there's some way you can eventually get a pickaxe so you can mine stuff. I am a total sucker for anything that will let me go dig shit up without having to worry about getting killed and yeah, I like the niceness thing too.

So I was all intrigued and excited and I went to the site to sign up to play and what I found out is there's a WAITING PERIOD to get in. Like, you go and put your name in and then I guess you have to wait for someone to send you an invitation to play. The thingee said the wait was about a day long. This morning I saw I had new messages and I went galloping into my Gmail box with high hopes and expectations but NO. I guess they really meant a WHOLE DAY. So now I'm sitting here anxiously waiting for my acceptance letter and perhaps somewhat compulsively searching the various informational forums and wikis so I can get some idea of what to do when/if they let me in. I AM IMPATIENT.

And insecure. What if they refuse to invite me? It sounds like the game involves a lot of social interaction with other players. What if they know I'm a social retard and they don't want to let me in? I hope there's a way you can learn to play without having to exchange a lot of social niceties. Do you suppose there will be an area set aside for antisocial people? Being friendly is scary. I know how to be nice, but I don't know how to be friendly until I feel sort of sure of myself. What if I get there and a horde of total strangers descends on me saying all kinds of nice things? Ack! All I want to do is explore places and find treasures. At least at first. And then maybe I'll sell my treasures and make enough money to build a giant fort and I'll get all kinds of superpowers and minions and I'll take over the universe. Okay, just a fort, then. I wonder if I can build a treehouse. A treehouse would be cool. With a hidden trap door. And maybe a periscope. There would need to be a password and a secret handshake. Maybe I could get a pet frog. I wonder if there are any mummified frogs there.

I think it kind of sucks to unveil a cool new thing and make it sound all fun and interesting and then refuse to let people in. I mean, I kind of get why they're doing it this way. From what I can figure, it seems like the beta testers (for those of you who don't know what that means, beta testers are the people who play games to test them for bugs and such before those games are opened to the general public) have grown into a tight-knit community and they don't want a giant influx of newbies causing problems now that they've opened up the game to the public at large. Maybe they weren't anticipating such a positive reaction? Maybe it's all part of a giant plan to make people want to get involved by making it seem all exclusive and special?

God, I'm such sucker for that wanting-to-get-into-the-exclusive-club thing. But I'm primed for something to take the place of Minecraft, which seems to be leaning more and more towards being a game of monsters and survival. I'm sure you're all fascinated. Nevertheless, I'm going to keep you updated on my progress whether you like it or not. IF THEY EVER LET ME ACTUALLY PLAY, THAT IS.

Inside the Symbolic Logic of a Bruce

2011-09-27T10:33:00.000-04:00

And Everyone Lived Happily Ever After, The End.

2011-09-25T20:53:00.008-04:00

Earlier this evening I heard the telltale thwack of a bird hitting the window and of course I had to go charging melodramatically outside in a frenzy of alarm and hope. Alarm because the thwack often means I find a broken-necked bird on the ground; hope because every once in awhile the bird is just stunned, which means I get to help it and pet it and stuff.

I looked all over and didn't find any dead bird and then I got a ladder so I could look on the roof of the garden shed because sometimes when they smack the window that's where they fall. And look! Not dead at all! This little greenish bird was just hunching there looking sort of blinky and concussed.

So because I'm such a hands-off kind of nature chick I had to haul the ladder around to the other side of the shed so I could get a closer look. I haven't noticed this kind of bird around before. Over the past couple days, we've had some little flocks of birds that seem to like scratching around in the grass, but I haven't paid much attention to them, so I don't know if there have been others like her around or if she's by herself.

I don't know what kind of bird she is. I'm not the Audubon dude, okay? I tried to look it up online but all I could come up with was a yellow-green vireo, and from what I can figure they don't come this far north. (If anyone knows any bird-brainy people who might be willing to take a look at these pictures and give me an opinion, that would be awesome.)

You'd think this would be close enough, right? This bird was definitely stunned. I had my camera like four inches away from her. Any closer and she'd've been dealing with photographic injuries, as well. But I couldn't turn around and LEAVE her there. What if she had a terrible head injury and was about to go into a coma? Did I want to be responsible for abandoning an injured bird to die a slow, horrible death on the roof below my window? What if she had a broken wing? She hadn't moved, except to blink and wobble. It was going to get dark soon and I wanted to make sure she was flight-worthy. Plus look how soft she looks! Don't you just want to pet her, just a little? And she had these cool little black whiskers growing out either side of her beak. Okay, I know they're not whiskers. I know birds don't have whiskers. Whatever.

Look! They're totally whiskers.

Anyhow, she let me pick her up, which is never a good sign, but after a few seconds she sort of flailed around and then righted herself and grabbed onto my finger.

I held her for awhile and took seventeen hundred pictures. At first she just sort of sat there with the dazed expression one often has after divebombing headfirst into a window but pretty soon she perked up enough to start looking around and glare at me a little. Here is a picture of her ferocious self. She was trembling all over when I took it.

In a few more minutes she seemed much more alert, and not as trembly, and she started fidgeting, which was my signal to begin walking around the yard with my hand out, raising and lowering it like a slow roller coaster. With most birds, when you start coming down from the high point of the roller coaster, they flutter their wings a little to counteract the falling sensation, and that seems to remind them they have wings and can fly away now. But this one had the funniest reaction. When I would swoop up to the top of the curve, she would totally scrunch herself down, like she was trying to swallow her head into her neck, and when I went down, she would stretch her head up and out. Unfortunately I didn't get pictures of this, as I was maybe laughing too hard and I forgot.

Anyhow a bit later little Miss "I was just trying to take the shortcut through the building" seemed totally fine. She stopped glaring at me and turned into a total ham for the camera.

There's something, I don't know, profound about these kinds of interactions. It's like touching a little piece of magic or something. I feel it whenever a chickadee lands on my hand, too. It's like my whole self goes into a tiny time warp where everything slows down so I can catch the moment. I don't know how to explain. The chickadees only land for a second or two, just long enough to grab some seeds. But this little bird needed time to collect her wits. I turned her this way and that and got to look at every feathery bit of her. It was totally cool.

Finally I went and stood near a tree and poked at her feet. In my vast ornithological experience, I've come to the conclusion that wild birds don't like it when you mess with their feet. After a bit of stepping back and forth, she opened her wings and did a perfect take-off. Before she let go of my finger she gave me one last look. Which, I don't care what anyone says. That bird SMILED at me.

Crossing Verminator off My List of Possible Future Careers Now

2011-09-22T08:27:00.003-04:00

You know what is not relaxing? When you're falling asleep at night and you hear the sudden unmistakable THWACK of a mousetrap snapping shut in the crawlspace right underneath your bed. It's probably just another false alarm, right? Because those wussy newfangled plastic traps Diane came home with the other day seem to be more feeding stations than actual traps. So you probably don't have to get up to go investigate. And even if it DID catch a mouse, you can handle the idea of sleeping all night with a dead mouse right below you, right? You sat in the basement with dead uncle for more than one night, after all; you can totally handle a dead mouse for a mere seven or eight hours. Right. No problem. Get back to the business of falling asleep. Don't think about uncles or basements or that one time there was a mouse that you tried to make friends with and what happened next. Definitely don't think about that. And don't start thinking about what might be going on underneath you right now if the mouse is trapped but DIDN'T die. Just because earlier today you read that horrible horrible horror story on some mouse killer forum about that poor little mouse who did not die right away and it is such a horrible story you are not even going to repeat it -- that doesn't mean some similarly horrible thing is happening down there right now. Go back to sleep. There is no half-dead mouse down there frantically dragging the trap around, dying a slow tortured death. Seriously. And no, now is not the time to yet again grapple with the moral implications of being the designated mouse killer in the family. Think about something else! Think about something relaxing, like what kinds of ridiculous conversations mummified frogs get into when they come across other dead things in the yard. Think about how cranky Bruce will react when simple Bruce brings home a little parade of dead bugs. Think about -- THWACK!

All right. That's another trap going off. That poor half-dead mouse was probably running around in a panic and somehow set off another trap. Now it's running in pathetic circles with two wussy newfangled traps hanging off it. Fine. There's no way you're falling asleep now. Might as well get up and go save the tortured mouse.

Well, okay. The good news is: two more dead mice. Updated tally is Siren: 13; Mice: whatever 11,000 minus 13 is.

Impulse Control, Bruce-Style

2011-09-21T08:34:00.002-04:00

Edited to add: Good grief how many different times can I mistakenly post this? Apologies to those of you who follow via Google Reader or whatever. I HAVE BEEN EXPERIENCING TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES OKAY?

Speaking of Cats

2011-09-20T08:38:00.001-04:00

Why is it that cats go totally bonkers right after you feed them?

I just fed Miro and now she's tearing around the house like the Tasmanian Devil. Ears flat, tail lashing, a look of pure insanity on her face. She whips out of the kitchen, skidding, hind legs doing that scrabble-scrabble-scrabble thing as she rounds the corner. Then she stops to do a spastic grooming thing before suddenly flinging herself down the length of the living room, making sure every time to jump THROUGH the little table we have temporarily stationed with a fan on it.

No time to go around! I'm on my way, FAST!

Once she's through the table, it's a headlong rush into the work room behind me. Then I hear the thud as she hits the front of the cupboard in there because the work room has no rugs for her to brake on. Then it's back into the living room, up along the back of the couch, over to my desk, where she always takes a sharp left turn in order to run between me and the computer monitor. I've already had to delete two of her keyboard-stomp events since beginning to write this entry.

What is that I don't know I must go this way now FAST.

Then she catapults (hahaha, get it? CATapults?) to the floor and pauses just long enough to jam her head into the eco-friendly grocery sack for a second before stampeding back into the kitchen and starting all over again.

Mmm, smells like reduced carbon footprint in here.

It's like you put food into her and she instantly turns into a scary-eyed dementia ball. Is this just my weird cat or do all cats do this after they've eaten?

Who you calling dementia ball?

P.S. I wrote the above entry last night and then this morning I was just over at June's blog and I see she posted a blog entry in which my cat speaks in that annoying just-for-animals voice that all June's animals speak in. I'm not sure what kind of voice it is, but it seems to be some unholy combination of babytalk and lolspeak and lolcats-dialect. Who is not amused?

"Ant Joon," my ass. You are dead to me, bitch.

Also. I had nothing to do with that butthole picture, do you hear me? Nothing.

The Ongoing Adventures of Bruce and Bruce

2011-09-19T18:52:00.001-04:00

The Perils of Two-Part Posting

2011-09-18T19:05:00.003-04:00

I'm taking a break from our mouse emergency while the battery for my drill recharges so I thought I'd come back and pick up where I left off yesterday.

Okay, now, see, this is how I end up getting myself in trouble with the blogging thing. Because yesterday I wrote this thing and then acted like there was some fascinating part two and at the time I did feel like I had more to say. But now here I am trying to remember what was so important that I had to make such a big deal out of it and really there's not much more to tell, since I already told the best stuff, which of course was the part where I had a couple semi-snappy comebacks. Even if one of them was one I totally stole. So anyhow now I have performance anxiety about finishing up the story. Hmph.

Really all that's left is the part where Diane -- who has all kinds of degrees in how to help people communicate more effectively with one another, who for a living teaches people how to communicate more effectively with one another, who is in charge of teaching other people how to teach people how to communicate more effectively with one another -- and okay I forgot how I started this sentence. Oh. Right. All that's left is the part where communications expert Diane finally, after many fits and starts, manages to mostly coherently articulate what is on her mind and once we're through with the part where I reassure her that I know she loves me for who I am and not because she's in the grips of a giant savior complex, we eventually have an interesting conversation about pathological liars and factitious disorders and malingering and impostor syndrome and I forget the other terms but apparently this is a whole ISSUE in the mental health professions. She says the extent to which this twelve-year-old girl is making stuff up is unusual (as is the extent to which various helper people have gotten seriously over-involved and are now reacting in weird ways), but more toned-down versions of kids lying and creating crises (and helper people playing fast and loose with professional boundaries) aren't all that uncommon. Even so, there aren't a lot of clear guidelines on how to deal with it or treat it.

You'll be proud of me when I tell you not once did I mention how fast and loose Diane herself played with the professional boundary thing by, you know, taking me home with her and all.

I think it's sweet and kind of funny that she was worried I might think the only reason she cares about me is because I was such a captivating heartbreaker-of-a-life-story victim. I'm pretty sure I never worried about that for one second, seeing as how it seems to require I view myself as a victim. Which is totally ridiculous, since I go in and out of even believing that what happened with my uncle qualifies as real abuse. I do count the other stuff, though, rapes and dumpsters and such, because I'm not a complete moron. Of course that's not the stuff that bothers me, hmph. In any case I don't feel the least bit victimy about any of it. Okay, I'm not even sure what it would mean to feel victimy. But whatever it means, that's not how I feel. Hm, I'm not sure how I got off on this tangent. It's way more weird to me to talk about this than it is to hang around while Diane processes her shit about her twelve-year-old liar.

Anyhow blah blah blah and speaking of which, you know what would be kind of awesome? If a pathological liar wrote a true confessions book about being a pathological liar. Ooh, and then what if it turned out the liar was just a regular person POSING as a pathological liar? I'd totally read that book.

So yeah, that's it. Part Two: The Totally Anticlimactic and Half-Assed Conclusion to the Weird Conversation I Had With Diane. I'm sorry. I'm a disappointment even unto my own self.

Okay I have to go check my drill battery now. I have walls to take down, you know. That was not some kind of deep metaphor or anything. I really am taking down a wall.

Oh oh oh! AND. The count is now Siren: 11; Mice: 10,989.

Edited to add:

I almost forgot. Here is a gratuitous cat picture because blogs are supposed to have pictures.

A Year Ago This Conversation Would Have Totally Freaked Me Out

2011-09-17T13:39:00.004-04:00

(P.S. To those who read this via Google Reader or whatever: Sorry for the double post. I don't know why changing the title makes a whole new post sometimes.)

So Diane comes home the other day looking all serious and annunciatory. Which should totally be a word we reclaim from the angel Gabriel to use for describing the look someone gets when she feels she has something important to tell you.

Do you know the look I'm talking about? I think it can take different forms. Like one form is when you're talking with someone and you're in the middle of a sentence and the other person suddenly thinks of something she wants to say, and she pulls in a little breath but then, like, HOLDS it and waits for you to finish, because she doesn't want to be impolite. And you just know she's not hearing a word you're saying anymore because all she's doing is barely holding on to her own thought, dying for you to pause so she can say her thing. Ellen does this every once in a while and by the time I'm getting to the end of my own sentence I want to yell, "Will you please just exhale and interrupt me already?" Sometimes I try to see how long I can draw out the thing I'm trying to say, just to see how long she'll go before taking a breath. I keep hoping one of these days she'll pass out from lack of oxygen but so far no dice. I'll also sometimes throw something totally random on at the end, like "And then I took off all my clothes" just to see if she'll catch it and seriously? About half the time she doesn't. Well. She always catches it eventually. But I mean in the moment.

So anyhow, yeah. Diane arrives home looking all annunciatory. But not in a way like she wants to pounce all over you to tell you things. I know I just spent a huge paragraph describing that version of the annunciatory look and it turns out that's not the one I'm actually talking about. I'm talking about the look someone gets when she has sobering news for you and is trying to decide when the best time to break it to you is.

And with Diane, you can't just go, "WHAT." And expect her to spill it. She has to work herself up to shit sometimes. She's not like me that way. She has an internal editor. So what you do is just ignore it. The problem with just ignoring it is you are likely to forget about it, which means you might not be completely prepared for it when she finally gets around to it.

So anyhow some time later we're in the living room and she's on the couch behind me and I'm trying to do really important stuff on the computer with pictures of my dead frogs, and she clears her throat and says, "You know ... ."

(Okay. I hate ellipses but that's what she does. She TRAILS OFF. And yes that extra period is there on purpose, after the space. Because even though her dialogue trails off, I want to be very clear that my sentence does not. I am not the traily-offy type, thank you very much. Neither is Diane, actually, which is one of the ways you can tell she feels sort of unsure. When she starts umming and fumbling and trailing off, you know she's having some kind of psychological issue.)

She says it in one of those annoying thoughtful significant voices, so I know I should turn around, but I'm in the middle of adding the word-bubble to the image and can't she see I'm BUSY? It isn't easy being the one who speaks for the mummified frogs. Plus I have my own psychological issues these days. Which I think I just totally proved by even writing that mummified frog sentence.

"You know," she says again. "If you suddenly turned to me one day and told me that everything that happened to you wasn't true, I'd still love you."

"Okay. And if you suddenly turned to me one day and told me you'd never believed me all this time, I'd still love you too."

Why is the first thing out of my mouth always so smartass? And why does Diane always want to have meaningful conversations when I'm in the middle of trying to channel dead frogs?

"Siren," she says.

Okay. If I don't turn around now then I've turned it into a THING. So I give up on my frogs and I swivel the chair and look at her. I tell myself if she says one word about my going to therapy I will not smack her or strangle myself with the camera cord. I try to arrange my face politely. I leave the option open of strangling her.

She looks a little hunched in, sitting there. A little bit frumpy. She's gained weight since I've known her, and aged, too. She doesn't like how she looks, but I still think she's beautiful.

"I just want you to know I care about you for who you are. Not for your story."

"Well that's a relief," I say. "Because I've been trying to figure out how to tell you I'm really a sixty-five-year-old Norwegian fisherman with a thing for middle-aged social workers and I have the total hots for you." The Norwegian fisherman thing is my friend Lacrema's line, and I shamelessly steal it and embroider it and deliver it with absolute poker face. P.S. I'm sorry for stealing your line, Lacrema; it was just too perfect for the moment.

Alas, Diane doesn't even crack a smile. "I'm serious," she says.

"Oh for god's sake. Why don't you ever start with the thing you really want to talk about?"

Then I have a sudden suspicious feeling. "Wait. Have you been trying to find me a therapist again? Did someone tell you my story is too weird to be true again?"

Diane shakes her head. "No," she says. She makes a dismissive gesture, like when she waves me off from talking in the background when she's on a client call. Then she sighs, and I settle in to listen.

"It's this kid. Not one of my kids. One of the people I supervise. She asked me to meet with this girl."

And she goes on to explain how this kid, this girl, keeps telling these horrible stories about terrible things people have done and are doing to her. At first people were all freaked out, but then they started realizing the girl was telling stuff that couldn't possibly be true.

"She reminds me of you," Diane says. "I mean in that she's really smart and charming and exotic-looking, with these amazing eyes, and she's this tiny thing who just gives off this incredibly heartbreaking haunted waif vibe."

"I do not give off a haunted waif vibe, dammit!"

"Well, not so much anymore. But you--"

"And I am not tiny! Have you even noticed I'm as tall as you now?"

"I had noticed that, actually, since you mention it every time you stand up. But you are missing the point here. The point is--"

"Wait. You think I'm charming and exotic-looking?"

"Oh, honey." She says this in her "You are such a stupid dear sometimes" voice. Which means I have to redirect, FAST, or she'll start in with a bunch of reassuring parental shit. Her hand is already halfway across the space between us, because Diane is touchy-feely that way.

"So the point is what," I say. I restrain myself from pulling my entire body to the side and smacking at her hand a little. See? I'm perfecting my nonverbal communication skills. I've learned Diane moves along better if you let her get in those reassuring pats. Plus she's good at them and they feel kind of nice sometimes.

She pats my knee and I don't flinch and that takes care of that so she carries on with her psychological issue. Which seems to amount to Diane feeling upset about everyone at work getting all pissy and weirded out over this girl. Like her coworkers are getting all fixated on comparing stories, trying to determine which parts of her story are true, feeling mad and tricked and foolish. And in contrast, Diane is all fixated on what would motivate a twelve-year-old girl make up lies about people abusing her in the first place, especially when she already has a perfectly legitimate and verifiable abuse history of her own.

Argh! Why do I always turn these things into long involved stories when Diane is just about to get back from grocery shopping!

Okay I gotta jet. I'm sorry to leave this hanging and I'll come back to it when I have a chance but in the meantime here's a random picture of my cat to make up for it. This is an old picture, from when we still had the horribly uncomfortable but non-behemoth couch.

What? You can't see her? Then let me give you a top-down view.

Also. Remind me sometime to tell you about how when I was a little kid I totally misunderstood the phrase "in the meantime." I remember getting in this fight with Allison when she suggested we do something in the meantime and I was all, "NO! I don't want to do anything in the meantime! I hate the meantime! I only want to do things in the nice time!"

Okay, I guess you don't have to remind me about telling that story because I just did. Way to deflate all the suspense, Siren.

Cat Therapy

2011-09-16T11:27:00.002-04:00

You think pervert uncle was psycho? I can help you.

Just touch me. I'll show you psycho.

C'mon, touch me. For your own good. Trust me. I just want to help.

I Am Stompy Today

2011-09-15T11:26:00.002-04:00

Okay yesterday I said I didn't know why I suddenly had to go on a giant complaining spree but that isn't really true. I know why I feel complainy. It's because I feel generally grouchy. And the reason I feel generally grouchy is because I'm in one of those stupid EMOTIONAL HEALING PHASES where it once again seems like every other thing in my life has some creepy connection back to my stupid pervert uncle. I am having PSYCHOLOGICAL ISSUES, y'all. See? I just said "y'all." I'm from Massachusetts, y'all. We do not say "y'all" here. Unless we are having psychological issues.

What is the deal with HEALING PHASES anyhow. They suck. I mean, most of the time I walk around with the nyah-nyah feeling, like, "Nyah nyah, you total freakwad, look at me living my happy life and you all flat-headedly dead in the ground! I survived and you didn't and you also didn't get your nasty spider fingers into every corner of my psyche and you are no longer controlling or even affecting my life anymore so there. Nanny-nanny-nyah-nyah!"

But then I will get into this phase where it seems like everywhere I look there's yet another of his shadows. Why do I hate to go barefoot anywhere? Because he never let me wear shoes. Why do I resist stretching every morning even though I seem to have tendons with a genetic imperative to shrink and harden? Because of those stupid stretching exercises he used to make me do. Why am I tired and gritty-eyed again? Because he is all up in my nighttimes even if I don't remember it. Why am I snapping at my friends who innocently try to tease me about my aversion to cyberhugs? Why do I have such an aversion to cyberhugs in the first place? Why is my personal space bubble (even my online, virtual one) big enough to extend past county lines? Because he never let me have a personal space bubble. Because he was constantly touching me. Because he stole my skin. Blah blah blah.

So yeah. I am grouchy. I will NOT live the rest of my life in reaction to some creepy sociopath. It pisses me off to give him, it, what happened -- for any of that to take up so much space in the front of my brain. This is exactly what he would groove on. Knowing I'm thinking about any of it. I'm fine with processing things like hot shots and head stomps and rapes and dumpster johns. I don't like how it's those creepy three years with him, those times when nothing really all that horrible happened, that seem to be having the biggest or most lingering effects. Why can't I be a normal abuse survivor and get all jammed up over the obvious stuff? Why do I always have to zoom in on the undefinable shit? Okay these are rhetorical questions, I guess. BAH.

I think I have to go outside in the yard and kill something now. Like vines or something. Or any mice I happen to come across. Okay not really. I do not stomp mice, y'all. Just perv-heads.

Okay. I Feel Better Now.

2011-09-14T16:41:00.005-04:00

There has been a giant fly in the house all day totally torturing me. It's been buzzing around really fast for hours and it won't stay in one area long enough for me to get a bead on it and it is driving me completely bonkers. Every time it zips by I grab the fly swatter and jump up and hold perfectly still just long enough to figure out where it is and then I launch myself at it. I know if someone could see me it would appear I am playing some kind of bizarre version of freeze tag with myself. But no matter what I do I can't seem to get it because the little fucker won't LAND anywhere. So all that ends up happening is I run around smacking maniacally at things and knocking shit over and swearing and did I mention it's really hot and muggy today?

AND. Last night I put five spring traps under the house and this morning when I went to check them, four of them had been stripped of food but remained totally UNSPRUNG. And the fifth one did have a dead mouse but it had snapped in such a way that the mouse wouldn't just fall off the trap when I held up the little springy part. I had to hold that part up with one hand and DISENTANGLE the thing with the other and PEEL its flattened middle part from around the springy thing and it was HORRIBLE. However, there was another dead mouse on the floor of the crawlspace; that one probably died from the poison. Which, by the way, we put down like five million thingees of poison and it's only Wednesday and every last pellet and brick is GONE. P.S. Anyone who says one word about how cruel poison is better also have an alternative suggestion that does not involve us driving every mouse five miles away. Oh and no drowning, either. I hate killing the cute little mice but having my bedroom directly over a urine-soaked crawlspace not only is unpleasant but also seems to be having some negative effects on my nighttime breathing.

Anyhow for anyone who's keeping score, since there are about eleven thousand mice under there the tally is Siren: 2; mice: 10,998.

AND. A neighbor borrowed our weedwhacker the other day and needed a long extension cord, too, and today when I went out into the garden shed for something else I noticed she had returned the stuff and the cord was in a gigantic KNOT rather than in the TOTALLY PERFECT coil it had been in when she borrowed it. Could she have at least made a tiny pretense of trying to coil it back up? Am I just being too anal? I think it's rude to borrow something and not return it in the same condition it was in when you got it.

AND. Diane is sometimes totally cheap -- or maybe it's politically correct -- in ways that just don't make any sense to me. She's always pulling stuff out of the dryer before it's completely dry. Usually I remember to wait until she's not looking and then put my stuff back in for another go-around but I forgot with this most recent load and right now I'm wearing a T-shirt and I just realized it has this horrible faint smell like a sour dishrag. Fine, yes, I'm going to take it off but this is the second sour shirt and now it's just gonna end up in the wash again and where's the energy savings in that? Now instead of just a second run through the dryer, it's going to need BOTH a wash AND two runs through the dryer. According to my math skills that's an energy waste of like nine hundred bazillion percent.

AND. Ovulation is GROSS.

P.S. I don't know why I suddenly had to go on a giant complaining spree but I feel much better now.

The Care and Feeding of Bruces

2011-09-13T09:15:00.000-04:00

Aww, look what I saw on the back deck yesterday! These pictures are blurry because I took them from inside, through the slider, but still. That fat little Bruce is totally cute. I especially like the one where the dad is like, "BACK OFF, CHICKADEE." And then the poor little chickadee goes and hunches unhappily on the railing crossbar below.

Serial Killers, Bats, and Other Things That Go Bump in the Night

2011-09-12T09:59:00.004-04:00

People kept telling me I should start watching Dexter. I finally decided to give it a chance. Now I'm addicted. I'm halfway through season three. There are five seasons. I have to watch every episode before the new season starts at the beginning of next month. Guess what I've been doing with every second of my free time.

I like it because you end up rooting for the serial killer, which I think presents some interesting moral challenges. Diane says I overthink things sometimes. I think the word "overthink" should be illegal. Or there should be an automated slapper device that smacks you every time you say it. I also think you could make a movie about all the deaths I've ... uh ... been so intimately involved in and people would end up rooting for me, too. I said that to Diane and that shut her up but good, HA.

• • •

We have bats in our crawlspace! Or at least one bat. Do bats come in ones? Or are they like mice, like if you see one, you know there are at least thirteen thousand more? We have thirteen thousand mice down there, too. This past weekend Diane and I were putting various mouse-prevention measures into place and that's when we saw the bat. I've also seen a bat emerging from the crawlspace in the evening. Diane thinks it's creepy but I'm just beside myself with excitement. I live on top of a batcave!

Edited to add: I just learned that with humane traps you have to release each mouse like five miles away in order for it to not be able to find its way back. Moving on to Plan B: inhumane traps. NO NOT THOSE HORRIBLE STICKY THINGS. Just your good old-fashioned snap-trap. I know, I know, I know. It's awful. The cute little mouse. But. Eau de Mouse Urine and Hanta Virus under my bed. No.

• • •

Lena the Saturday dog seems to have grown more comfortable being here. It used to be that when Diane wasn't around, Lena would either point relentlessly at the door in a desperate waiting stance or hang around in the living room, where we would negotiate my personal space bubble and then she would plunk herself down and sleep dejectedly as close to me as I would allow. But look what I found the other day:

P.S. SHE TOTALLY SNORES, TOO. Sometimes she snores when she's awake. The other night while we were watching TV, I heard this sound, so I looked under the coffee table and Lena was sprawled all over Diane's feet looking up at the television, totally wide awake and yet snoring. Go figure.

• • •

My nightmare-things seem to go in weird cycles. It doesn't make sense to me. I can go weeks without one and then bam. A total, what's the word, a total SPATE. Diane and Ellen both continue to say they're not exactly nightmares. More like some kind of flashback-things or some stupid shit. I feel cranky about it all. I don't like this subconscious business. My psyche is trying to work shit out but won't just come right out and tell me what the problem is? That's so inefficient. I want a more direct explanation than nighttime disturbances I don't even remember, for chrissake.

• • •

I have to put a cat picture to balance out the dog picture.

A Sweet Potato, I Said

2011-09-11T17:32:00.001-04:00

Frogs at Play

2011-09-08T17:11:00.000-04:00

I Am the Worst Hostess Ever

2011-09-05T14:29:00.002-04:00

So last week I had a craving for cheesecake and I asked Diane to get some when she went grocery shopping. I don't know why I suddenly needed cheesecake. The last time I had it was when I was a little kid. I bet I saw a commercial or something. I'm always rediscovering things.

Anyhow Diane came back with a little container, in which were these three dainty pieces of plain cheesecake. I was helping put groceries away and I saw it because it's in a see-through container and the only thing that kept me from tearing into it right then and there was the fact that Diane had also brought home molasses cookies, which I could eat at the same time as one-handedly helping put groceries away. So the molasses cookies totally distracted me and then I wasn't hungry.

Diane and I shared a half of one of the pieces after dinner that night and it was HEAVENLY. She'd gotten this other stuff the week before, see, this boozy stuff that you dribble on ice cream, perhaps because she feels guilty being the only alcoholic in the house and is trying to trick me into being a total enabler but guess what. That dribbly stuff is REALLY REALLY good. So the other night I dribbled some on the cheesecake. Delicious.

So now I have two and a half little slices left.* In a see-through container. And sometime later we have guests coming. One of whom has already proven herself perfectly comfortable with rooting around in the refrigerator for goodies. And I'm all jammed up over how to protect my cheesecake. I just have these horrible scenarios in my head of Painted Coyote Woman sniffing around my refrigerator and being all, "OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT OH YOU HAVE CHEESECAKE I LOVE CHEESECAKE!"

Should I try hiding it in the little refrigerator in the guest room? But that would put it right under their noses! What if they're in there and they can't sleep and they're like, "Let's see if there's anything super-tasty in the fridge!"? Maybe some people snoop through refrigerators like other people snoop through medicine cabinets. Should I leave it in the big refrigerator and just tape a huge sign to it that says "Touch me and die"? Diane says that's not a very nice message to send to houseguests. I considered trying to eat it all before they arrive but cheesecake is VERY FILLING, and also I'm not interested in making myself puke, which is probably what would happen if I tried to eat two and a half slices of cheesecake all at once. Maybe I should transfer them into a non-see-through container.

Right now I have the container hidden behind a big bag of lettuce on the top shelf. Painted Coyote Woman didn't seem all that interested in lettuce last time she was here. I'm going to have to keep my eye on her. Do you think it would seem unfriendly if I just parked myself in front of the refrigerator with a squirt bottle and a fly swatter? I could try to be totally subtle about it.

_________________

*Well, two slices now.

Things I Don't Understand. Plus Bonus: My Million Dollar Ideas. Steal Them and You're Dead Meat.

2011-09-03T11:17:00.010-04:00

Things I Don't Understand

1. Figurine Candles

You know, little human or animal figures with the wick sticking out the top of the head. Example:

I am not going to light the poor little owl's one hair on fire and then watch her face melt down the front of her feathers. What did the little owl ever do to me? There are "guardian angel" candles too. I think you'd have to be pretty conflicted to buy yourself a guardian angel and then melt it to death.

I mean, I could understand if there were, like, Hitler candles, or pervert uncle candles.

Huh. I think I might have just come up with another million-dollar idea. Send me a picture! I will make a candle out of the person you most want to set on fire.

2. Figurine Soap

Same idea. Look at the cute little turtle!

Why would I want to use this? You lather it up, rub rub rub, and then the next time you look all the turtle's fins have eroded away to useless nubs and now she's a quadruple amputee and how does she swim away from the killer orca and it's ALL YOUR FAULT.

(ASIDE:

I do, however, LOVE LOVE LOVE these hand soaps:

)

3. Commercials Featuring Animated Edibles

Like those ads for chocolate bars or soy milk. They show little human figures made of chocolate or soy milk dancing or doing some sporty thing or whatever, and then the people dive or melt into a giant lake of chocolate or soy and then the lake gets sucked into a packaged form like a candy bar or a carton of milk.

Okay, look. I do not want to ingest the swimming dude or the little girl who was just merrily swinging on the chocolate swing. Never mind the moral implications. What if I take a bite and all that activity starts happening in my mouth? What if the soy guy starts doing the backstroke in my throat? What if I feel a movement on my tongue and I go to the mirror and open my mouth and see the dissolving face of a little girl with braids? She would be trying to say "Help meee!" like the guy in The Fly but she wouldn't be able to because from the chin down she would've already stopped the world and melted with me.

It's all just creepy. Also, it bugs me that the little chocolate girl jumps off the swing into the chocolate lake with all her clothes on. Not that I want her to be naked or anything. I'm not a choco-perv. See what I mean? You can't even TALK about these commercials without finding yourself in creepy territory. I like my chocolate people-free, thank you. What do little kids think when they see these kinds of commercials and then enjoy their snacks? Do they look down into their glasses of soy milk HOPING to see a little swimmy dude to slurp up? Do they imagine they're totally chomping on dismembered chocolate body parts? In twenty years will we realize these ads encouraged a whole generation of latent semi-cannibals?

Okay enough with the numbers. Later today the Saturday dog comes. Diane is out grocery shopping and doing eleven thousand errands right now. I should go do my Saturday chores before she gets back. Oh but first I have to tell you: Last night as I was falling asleep I came up with another million-dollar idea. Nails that yell "OW!" every time you hit them with the hammer.

For some reason this struck me as completely hilarious. Hahaha! Struck me! OW! Hahaha!

The Lawn Furniture of Bruces

2011-09-02T10:33:00.001-04:00

Too Close to Nap Time for a Pithy Title

2011-09-01T12:58:00.001-04:00

Despite not doing any real damage around here, the storm still threw me for a loop. Just one day without power, a couple days of my normal routine being disturbed, and I get all jammed up. It takes me forever to reestablish my equilibrium.

• • •

Speaking of which. Splatter-Painted Dances with Coyotes Woman is due to visit again. She's coming on Monday and bringing her official husband. She has an unofficial husband as well, and yes, they all live in the same house. Official husband has one of the most boring traditional boy names on the planet, so I will blog-alias him as Jack. Coyote chick and Jack will be staying for two nights. Much to my horror. I wonder what sort of craft project she'll bring this time.

• • •

Recently a friend made a casual reference to reborn dolls on her blog. I realize it had nothing to do with the many casual references to reborn dolls I have made over my bloggy/forumy/commenty career, but still, I felt undeservedly self-satisfied upon seeing it, as though somehow any and all awareness of uncanny-valley things among my friends is my doing. Like I have singlehandedly effected a weirdness consciousness-raising about this issue. (P.S. I always write "consciousness-raising" as "consciousness-razing" because I think it fits better. Then I have to change it to "raising" so people don't think I'm making a mistake. But in my head it's always "consciousness-razing.") I don't care that there are other ways people in my circle might have come across the concept. I'm going to sit here and feel smugly informative just the same.

And I'm going to keep my eyes peeled for casual references to things like robotic mouths and balut and bot flies (which I'm not linking to -- YOU'RE WELCOME) and mummified frogs. And devoteeism. Which I could not put in the same sentence because I don't believe it belongs in among the dead things and bird fetuses and flesh-eating parasites and such. And should I notice any of my friends making such references, I'll be sure to feel equally smug about it.

• • •

I have no idea what this thing is called. I got it from the hoarded house. I love it because it feeds into all my childhood fantasies of becoming a safe-cracking art thief and all-around cat burglar. I don't even know what it's legitimately for. To me, it's for holding the glass as you cut your B&E circle, and then for suckering yourself to the ceiling upside down as you sneak past the laser lights. Obviously you need one for each hand and foot.

• • •

And finally. My cat is ridiculous. And totally invisible.

You cannot see me. I am stealthy. I am a ninja.

I am the best hider of all time.
Look! I just retracted like a mollusk.

No One Understands Me

2011-08-31T08:27:00.001-04:00

Diane arrived home from work last night and took one look at me and was all, "What's wrong?" So I kind of burst out half-crying and I told her how I missed the big hatching event and even though she's never been all that into the snake eggs thing she patted at me and tried to say helpful things. So one minute she's all comforting and understanding, and then the next minute she goes into the kitchen and I hear this hideous SHRIEK.

"Geeyaaagh!" she shrieks. "What! The! Fuck!"

Then she comes back into the living room with a horrified face that is distinctly no longer even remotely comforting and understanding.

"Tell me those are not. Fucking. Snake. Eggs. On the windowsill over the sink."

"Don't touch them!" I say. "They're very fragile." The fragile part isn't exactly true but I learned when I was rinsing them that it's really easy to make them collapse.

"They're not in any danger of me touching them, ever," is what she replies. Then she crosses her arms over her chest and looks totally disgusted. "Can we display them somewhere else?"

"They're not on display. They're DRYING. I'll move them once they're done drying. You giant sissy."

"Why can't you be interested in pressing flowers or something?"

"Hey. What kind of therapist are you? You could be a little more compassionate. I'm in mourning here."

"Well, you're on dish duty, then, too. Because I am not going to stand at the sink and wash dishes while staring at a bunch of creepy snake eggs." She says this over her shoulder as she goes into her room to change out of her work clothes. Diane will use any excuse to get out of having to do the dishes.

"I can't be on dish duty," I yell. "I'm on bereavement leave."

"Oh for god's sake," I hear her say. Like, muttering.

"And it's not a bunch of eggs. It's a CLUTCH! Or it was. A clutch of eggs. Is what it's called. And they're not creepy. They're cool."

No response.

"And pressing flowers is for BABIES and GIRLY-GIRLS!"

Honestly. I don't understand Diane sometimes. She can be so uptight.

Dammit

2011-08-30T14:59:00.001-04:00

So the good news is: sixteen baby snakes hatched successfully today and slithered happily off to go live snakey lives. The bad news is: I totally missed it!

I was so busy this morning finishing up the after-storm cleanup that I didn't remember to check the egg pile until about half an hour ago. And as I brushed away the dirt, what I saw made my heart sink.

Okay, I thought. So maybe just the top ones hatched. Maybe it takes them a while to all hatch. Maybe there are still some underneath who are in process.

But, no. I pulled out each egg one by one, hoping to find a late bloomer. Sixteen chances. No luck.

And the worst thing? Not only did I miss it, but I just barely missed it. These eggs are still full of wet yolk. They haven't been empty more than a few hours.

I am so bummed. I blew it. I trusted the information I found on the internet too much, which said two months and a few days. I wasn't paying as close attention as I should have because I thought it wouldn't happen until sometime later this week. I know it's stupid and I know I shouldn't feel this bad but I'm so disappointed. Almost crying, even. I feel like I screwed up a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity here.

I know. I'm ridiculous. They're just dumb snakes. And anyhow, at least I know they all made it, since I didn't find any petrified unhatched eggs. And I have the leftover egg shells. Which are pretty cool. They're like little leather pouches. And they all have a precise slit in them where the little Bruce inside chewed her sneaky way out.

And I've looked all over the yard for evidence of baby snakes and nothing. Nada zilch bupkiss. Which I have no idea how to spell.

Sometimes it's hard to talk yourself out of feeling bad. I think I need to go mope for a while.

All in All, Rather Non-Eventful

2011-08-29T10:54:00.000-04:00

So we survived the storm with only one smashed mailbox, a few downed branches, and about ten hours of having no electricity. Ellen, however, who lives further up Cape and more on the ocean side, still has no power and reports lots of big broken branches everywhere and AWOL lawn furniture.

Yesterday evening I buffeted down to the beach just before it got dark to see what the water looked like and to take some pictures and I got a free bonus full-body dermabrasion in the process. Hint: Do not walk in front of a three-foot-tall berm of sand with 50-mph winds blowing in your face.

Taken on my way to the beach. Also, proof of windiness.

View of the water. Windy.

Taken this morning.

Aw, did the psycho robin's nest fall out of the tree? I'm almost afraid to touch it. Do you think mother robins guard their abandoned nests? ALSO. It took me until just the other day to realize I've been spelling Mrs. Lechter's name wrong this whole time. There is no H in Mrs. Lecter. There was no H in Cheetos, either. Wat is it wit me and tat letter? A a a! I'm totally cracking myself up now. I sound just like Count Dracula. A a aaa!

Okay so anyhow my stormy pictures are kind of lame. Around these parts it was a big nothing. Not that I'm complaining, exactly.

Now I have to go out with the loppers and saws to free the mailbox from the tree that is trying to become one with it. And also I have to drain two giant rubbish barrels full of water. Whose brilliant idea was that, anyhow? Yes they are too heavy for me to just push over. Don't think I didn't try.

Irene Is a Breeze So Far

2011-08-28T12:03:00.002-04:00

Well the main effect of the storm so far is the power keeps cutting out. I'm so glad I have the uninterruptible power supply protecting this computer! The power has already gone out three times this morning. For less than a minute each time but I totally expect we'll lose power for real sometime today. I mean, we always do when there's any chance than anyone might. We haven't had any rain, really, but it is windy. Diane and I walked down to the beach, because isn't that what you're supposed to do in a hurricane?, and saw that the people in charge of the beaches (the shellfish police?) had piled a bunch of sand to bridge the access area where the seawall opens. But no one around here is putting plywood over windows or anything. I did take the precaution of filling a couple barrels with water in case we lose power for more than a day and need water for flushing. And we turned the refrigerator and freezer up to their coldest settings. Took the furniture off the roof deck.

We are of the belief that the more preparation we do, the more likely it is that the storm will peter out, making all our precautions a total waste of time. That seems to be how it works.

Actually I don't even think Irene is a hurricane any more. I think the weather people said it's a tropical storm now. See? It's working. I should go fill a few more barrels and the whole thing will wind down to a mere summer's breeze.

Yikes the power just went out again. Okay, even with my lovely uninterruptible power supply, I think it's time to shut down the computer. See you all on the other side.

I mean of the storm. Other side of the storm. I'm not having a John Edward moment here.

Radio Flyer Bruces

2011-08-27T08:28:00.003-04:00

Disaster Preparedness, in the Manner of Bruces

2011-08-25T14:09:00.000-04:00

P.S. I'd like to thank Steam Me Up, Kid for her disturbing saga of Keith and Chantal, where I first learned the joys of desecrating corpses.

The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Bruces

2011-08-24T18:58:00.000-04:00

I bet you all thought that was the end of the froggy Bruce story. Well not even close. The best is yet to come. Because once I rescued poor Bruce from the giant head-sliming slug, which basically involved my picking her up and putting her on the picnic table, I was walking around the yard again and lo and behold what did I see but ANOTHER BRUCE. A Bruce companion!

I KNOW! What are the chances?

Now this Bruce wasn't in the same sort of, you know, sluggy distress but I rescued her anyhow and brought her to the picnic table to make introductions. I just know in my heart these two are destined to be together.

How Have You Lived So Long Without This Thing?

2011-08-23T10:03:00.002-04:00

You guys are never gonna get this one. This mystery object takes the idea of "what the fuck?" to levels unimaginable.

Here it is, right out of the box:

And here's a side view, with a little label to indicate that it has magnetic feet. Can you tell I just figured out a few days ago that the program I use to resize these image files has an annotation function?

Now some disgruntled guesser recently emailed me complaining that the photo of the rat trap a few days back was unfair because I didn't include anything to indicate what size it was. She said all the people who guessed "mouse trap" should've gotten credit because how were they supposed to know the thing was gigantic? She said I should've shown a ruler or a coin or some other familiar household thing against which people could compare the mystery object to get an accurate sense of its size. Okay, fine, complainy guesser. I live to please my faithful readers. I hereby include a picture of the mystery object with a familiar referent:

Hahaha! JUST KIDDING. God I love my jokes so much. No, okay, seriously, here it is next to a normal-sized clothespin:

P.S. Enjoy this one because I'm thinking I need to slow the pace a bit with this identify-the-thingee game. At least until we go back up to the hoardy house and I can collect some more mysterious things.

I Would Like to Introduce You to My New BFF Bruce

2011-08-22T19:16:00.005-04:00

So all summer long I have been stalking various Bruces and then posting pictures and complaining about how pain-in-the-assy it is to stalk Bruces. When that last baby Bruce flew away few weeks ago, I was all, "Hooray!" No more having to get up at the crack of dawn to make sure I don't miss any fledge events. No more having to fight my way through poison ivy in order to sneak around the friendly neighbors so I could take pictures of the nest. No more having to clean up smelly severed duck heads from all over the yard. No more having to contend with psychotic parents attempting to rip my head off. My life was no longer subject to the whims of the Bruces coming and going. I was free. My time was my own again. Life was good. I was happy.

Then one day I found myself wandering around the yard, just sort of ... looking. Looking for something. Anything. I checked all the old haunts: empty nest after empty nest. I looked under the shed. Not even a foxy smell left there. I even dug down to find the snake eggs. Success! I got my camera and waited.

And waited.

P.S. I named them.

After a while it occurred to me to Google. Did you know this particular kind of snake egg takes a little over two months to hatch? I didn't know that. So I checked my archives. June 29? That means, uh, August 29 at the very earliest. See, I can do math when I have to. That is a long time to wait.

Okay, I don't know what happened. I was longing for a Bruce. I was circling my yard in search of a Bruce. I was so desperate for something to stalk I even stopped to take a picture of a frog.

Funny thing about that frog. She seemed to really like that one particular spot in my yard. Like, every time I walked by, there she was, just sort of hunkered down, enjoying the day. She was there the next day, too. And the next. One day she looked a little different, like maybe she'd gotten dressed up in a special yellow Sunday hat. I bent over to compliment her and I realized there was a giant yellow slug crawling over her head.

Gross, right? And what a brazen slug! Well, I couldn't just leave her there for disgusting homeless snails to slime all over.

So I decided to rescue her. I bent down to grab her and she never even flinched. It was like she KNEW I was there to save her. I rescued her and adopted her and named her Bruce.

And I thought there was no such thing as a fate worse than death.

Okay, I'm Easily Mystified. Fine.

2011-08-22T10:50:00.001-04:00

Okay, you all are going to identify this in five seconds. So I guess this entry is more of a "Show and Tell" than an "Identify this Mystery Object." But for real, if I didn't have the original box and instructions this thing came with, I'd have absolutely no idea what it was for. Even WITH the instructions I find the thing mystifying.

The little pointy things are sharp. Like, you could totally use this as a weapon. Not that my mind automatically goes there or anything.

The handle is spring-loaded. Anyone ever seen Reduced Shakespeare? You know the guy with the stage knife? How he pretends to stick it up his nose and is all, "Oooh, my BRAIN!" It's sort of like that, only it stops halfway. Not that I pretended to stick it up my nose. That might've resulted in a slight puncture incident. If it had happened. Which it didn't. It doesn't fit in my nostril anyhow. I don't have giant nostrils. Huh, I should've tried it in my ear instead.

P.S. I LOVE Reduced Shakespeare.

Okay those two pictures look exactly the same. But the first one is UP and the second one is DOWN. So it only goes in and out about an inch. It's a good thing I don't have a dirty mind or I'd totally be heading towards a sex joke right now.

I read somewhere that adding the S onto the word "toward" is a regional thing. I think saying it without the S sounds classier, but it doesn't feel natural. That is a bonus random fact about me. Which is why people come here, right? Whatever.

Also! Today is the first day in FOREVER that I have the house to myself. No more dog and no more cranky extra cat. I never realized before what a presence a dog is compared to a cat. I'm totally basking in my solitude. I'm frolicking in my aloneness. I'm so uncrowded, hooray! Even the occasional tumbleweed of dog fur blowing through the living room isn't bothering me. I love having the house to myself. Miro doesn't count. Don't tell her I said that or I'm dead meat.

Identify This: Bonus Round

2011-08-21T11:30:00.002-04:00

Well since you all solved the mystery of the music box pourer thingee in like three seconds flat, how about this, then, huh, wise guys? All I'm saying about it is it's three and a half inches tall.

Oh but how do you like my classy presentation? Diane said my first pictures didn't have enough contrast or some shit. So she got a towel. But that looked stupid. I was like, we need a black velvet backdrop! Well, we didn't have any black velvet lying around. But we did have an old windbreaker.

Edited to add:

Pictures of the bottom.

I Swear I Don't Know What This Is

2011-08-21T05:13:00.075-04:00

All right, for real, this one is a mystery to me. I found it in among a bunch of stuff having to do with liquor -- stuff like wine bottle openers and corky thingees and special caps and such. By "corky thingees" I mean stuff like this:

Now here's the mystery object:

To me it looks like something you'd put on the neck of a bottle. Of course I'm a little prejudiced by the fact that I found it with other bottle-related things. That little wind-up thing does indeed wind something up inside. If you blow on the bottom of the little tube, it comes out the end that has the little train-whistle flap-thingee. Once when I shook it it made a sort of chime sound, like one note of a music box. I'm afraid to wind it any further because I don't want to overtighten it. I can find no way to activate whatever is supposed to happen after you wind it up. I'm not sure if this is a complete thing in itself, or if there are supposed to be other parts to it.

I want to think it has something to do with aeration, but honestly, I'm completely mystified. Does anyone else recognize what it is or have any ideas what it might be for?

• • •

In other news, since the dog is not going to be here for the entire day, I think that lets me off the hook for having to come up with something positive to say about her.

Reproach

• • •

In other news, I finally heard back from the data recovery people. I know you all were just teetering on the edges of your seats fretting about the year's worth of photos and documents and Minecraft worlds I lost. The drive saver people say they've managed to recover 99% of my data! Hooray!

However, this is going to cost us a little over two thousand dollars. Which is pretty crazy, when you figure every last bit of everything on that drive (including all system files and applications) was only using up about 25G of space. The way I'm thinking of it, though, is this. It's like I just spent two thousand bucks on a special berlitz course designed to teach me the importance of a) having an uninterruptible power supply and b) having an automatic backup system. This knowledge will be useful for the rest of my life. If you figure I'm going to live another eighty or ninety years, that means I'll be paying between 22 and 25 dollars a year for this information. It's not so bad if you think of it like that.

• • •

I'm writing this entry late Saturday night, but I'm post-dating it (pre-dating it?) to tomorrow morning so it will automatically publish itself. I've never done this before. It feels like cheating. I'm totally going to set it to publish at a ridiculously early hour so you all will think I'm super diligent and industrious.

• • •

I have giant ear canals. No, seriously. I usually wear earplugs to bed in the summer because of the obnoxious renters with their yippy dogs and their tendencies to rampage up and down the street at all hours of the night talking in loud, often drunk, vacation voices, totally oblivious to or perhaps just uncaring of the fact that some of us have to LIVE here all year round and DO NOT want to listen to people cavorting back and forth to the beach at one o'clock every morning because we actually spend the wee hours TRYING TO SLEEP. Oh, remind me sometime to tell the story about the time the lovebirds rented the house across the street. Have I mentioned how well sound carries on a still night here? Okay I guess I kind of just told that story, huh, so never mind.

Anyhow. Where was I going with this? Oh, yeah. My giant ear canals. Very often the earplug in my left ear goes down so far I can't get it out with just my fingers. Like, it's too far down for me to pinch it and pull it out. I keep a pair of blunt tweezers on the windowsill next to my bed for just such occasions.

I'm only sharing this disturbing fact about myself in order to have five sections here. I couldn't think of anything else newsy to say so I resorted to creepy disclosures about my orifices. I'm sorry.

I Think I Like the Three Dots Better

2011-08-20T10:23:00.004-04:00

Say Something Nice About the Dog

I think it's amazingly efficient and hilarious how the dog is basically a kibble-operated turd dispenser. I mean, you feed her, and then the minute she's done eating, you take her outside. Then she trots dutifully off to the section of the yard I have designated her gross place ("Go to your gross place, Lena, go go go!") and immediately deposits a pile of poop. She's like a fur-covered gumball machine that drops crap pellets instead of savory treats. Kibble in, poop out. Kibble in, poop out. Do you suppose if she sat down really hard on a piece of coal, a diamond might pop out of her mouth? I bet all I'd get is a labradorite. Yes, there is actually a gemstone called labradorite.

That counts as saying something nice, right? I mean, I did say it was amazing and hilarious. And I did NOT say one word about the singularly horrifying experience of picking up a pile of dog shit with a plastic bag and suddenly realizing you CAN FEEL THE WARMTH OF IT THROUGH THE BAG AGAINST THE SKIN OF YOUR PALM.

And Diane Wonders Why She Gets Injured So Often

Invisible. Is what I am. Invisible and deadly.

Seriously. Like sticking your hands under there does not amount to totally BEGGING the cat to attack you. Why not just dip yourself in tuna oil, roll around in catnip, attach a live mouse to the end of your finger, and then waggle the laser light over it a few times?

My paw. It is ready.

Chipmunks Are Assholes

Can you tell I just remembered how to insert a horizontal rule?

Heh. I'm so easy to entertain. P.S. This is not its own section. This paragraph and the three rules above all belong to the "Can you tell I just remembered how to insert a horizontal rule?" section. In case anybody other than me is counting. Which I'm sure nobody was. Great. Now I've just drawn attention to it. I mean, I could've just kept my mouth shut, right? But then you KNOW someone would've come along and said, "Hey, did you know you made six sections? That's not an odd number of sections." Oh I want to smack that person.

Hey, check me out. I totally had a fight and beat up a faithful reader who WASN'T EVEN HERE.

Identify This

Last night, Lacrema told me she's not going to be online much over the next week and a half. This explains why we were able to play the "What the hell is this?" game for longer than seven minutes yesterday.

Here's today's picture. You guys will NEVER get this one.

Yes those are floor tiles in the background.

Wherein Siren Attempts to Display Fairmindedness About the Dog

2011-08-19T09:45:00.005-04:00

P.S. I can't remember if I'm supposed to capitalize "About" in titles or not. Do you leave it small because it's a preposition? Or do you capitalize it because it's a longer word than most of the other prepositions? I could Google it but I guess I don't really care that much. Great, now I've somehow reverse-psychologized myself into Googling it. There is something wrong with me.

P.S. Well I Googled and got no clarity so fuck it.

In order to exercise my open-mindedness about dogs I have set a challenge for myself. I have resolved to say at least one nice thing about Lena every day for the entire rest of the time she's here.

Today I'd like to say I think it's cool that when Lena refuses to go up the three small steps leading to the back porch, you can tell her to "go around to the front" and she'll gallop away and you can cut through the house and she'll meet you at the front door. This is a pretty neat trick and I think it displays how smart she is and I think it counts as saying a nice thing about her, especially since I didn't dwell at all on the part where every time she passes the tomato plants on her way to the front door she eats two or three green tomatoes and then later pukes them up in the middle of Diane's bed, which I now keep covered during the day with a plastic sheet, like the kind you put underneath bed-wetters, and on top of that a painter's drop cloth.

I had to add the drop cloth because Diane says Lena shouldn't have to sleep on a plastic sheet all day because she'll get hot and sweaty. Never mind that dogs don't sweat except through their paws and tongues. Diane knows about the hot and sweaty thing from personal experience because one time she visited an old person at some retirement community and they put her overnight in a spare room or something and there was a plastic sheet on the bottom and a polyester blanket on the top and at two o'clock in the morning she woke up totally drenched from nearly sweating to death in the middle of a giant plastic sandwich. This was before hot flashes so I'm actually inclined to believe her. For some reason I can't seem to convince Diane that the dog does not sleep on her bed all day and in fact only jumps up there to puke.

In other news, here's another thing for my various know-it-all smartypants friends to identify. Do you think Lacrema will be here within the next seven minutes? She will have to race The Furry Godmother and unlinkable Just Paula, who both also knew what yesterday's mystery item was. Then sbpoet came along wanting to steal them (I mean the wick trimmers, not Lacrema, The Furry Godmother, and Just Paula, even though they are also very worth wanting to steal if you ask me), which suggests she knew what they (the wick trimmers) were, too. Though maybe she only realized she coveted them after everyone else explained what they are.

As for the item below, I myself did manage to figure out what it was all on my own but I refuse to disclose how long it took. Also did you know the spell checker does NOT flag the word "smartypants"? Usually I hate the spell checker but this morning it's making me smile.

I Await Your Cutting Remarks

2011-08-18T11:01:00.000-04:00

Okay, readers, friends, commenters, lurkers, stalkers, and random passers-by. I need some help. What are these scissors for?

Extra information:

They are spring-loaded. So they want to stay closed. When you open them, the spring wants to pull them closed. There is about the same amount of tension (in reverse) as a pair of grass-cutting scissors. You know what I mean by grass-cutting scissors, right? I mean these things. So in other words, there's a fair amount of tension. You couldn't use them for more than a few minutes without your hand getting really tired.

They do cut. If you cut a little corner off a piece of paper, the corner falls into the rectangular bin and then the spring-loaded plate mashes it down.

Note that the cutting blade does not extend all the way down to the pointy part. So they only have a cutting edge of about an inch and a half long.

Questions:

Why are they spring-loaded?

What's the little bin for?

Why doesn't the cutting blade go all the way?

Are these scissors just designed for super anal people who only want to cut little corners off things and don't want to risk any scraps falling to the floor?

P.S. I also found these. Do you suppose they're related? These are not spring-loaded. Strangely, the edge of the "bin" part on these scissors is itself sharp and beveled, as though it, too, is a cutting edge.

So, yeah. Any ideas?

"No Drooling!" Does Not Compute

2011-08-17T21:41:00.002-04:00

Okay, you know what is gross? The string of drool.

First of all, I'm in charge of the dog's evening meal. This was part of the deal from the outset, since Diane doesn't get home until after the time the dog needs to eat. Okay, "needs to eat"? According to whom? This dog thinks she needs to eat every second of every day. Whatever. I knew going into it that I'd be the one doing the evening meal.

But somehow I've become the one in charge of feeding the dog, period. Okay, I know how this happened. See, these days, because of all those early mornings taking pictures of baby robins, I've gotten into the bizarre habit of getting up early, which means I'm usually awake before Diane is. And most of the time I can sneak around the kitchen and feed my cat without disturbing Diane. But this is not how it works with Lena the compass dog in the house.

The first day Lena saw me walking around the kitchen in the morning, her reaction was to frantically try to get Diane to wake up. Like, she was in there making these desperate whining sounds, pawing at Diane. I made the mistake of leaning my head in the room and saying, "Shh! What is your problem?" Which of course in Lena's brain translated into, "I AM THE FOOD BRINGER AND I SHALL GIVE YOU MOUNTAINS OF FOOD!" That dog catapulted over Diane's grumbling self and practically threw herself into my arms. Then while I fed the cats, she ran maniacally back and forth across the kitchen, whining and half-barking, sometimes stopping to jump the front of herself up and down on the clacky tippy-toes of her front paws. "Sit!" I said. And she did.

The next morning I crept into the kitchen without making a sound, and as I passed Diane's door, out of the corner of my eye I could see Lena teetering on the edge of the bed in a tense bundle of pure expectation. A coiled spring. A drawn slingshot. Literally quivering with hope and anticipation. Which is when I made mistake number two: I turned my head and made eye contact.

So now in the morning if I go anywhere near Diane's bedroom door, Lena gets totally spastic. And that is how I ended up being the meal chick.

And okay, Lena and I have come to some understandings. Like, once I make eye contact, she's allowed to jump out of the bed and fling herself into the kitchen. But while I'm putting together the cat food, she has to stay out of the kitchen and sit on one of the rugs. (She has trouble getting traction on the wood floor.) She doesn't have to go far away -- like, she can still keep me totally in her line of sight, which apparently is VERY VERY important to her -- she just can't be underfoot tearing around jumping and barking. She knows the commands for sitting and staying and being quiet and as long as you're firm about it, she'll totally do them. And after the initial frenzy of anticipation, she calms down and waits quietly while I chop the meat for the cats and dish out the ground stuff, blah blah blah. We both seem able to live with this compromise.

But.

I know she can't control this. And there's no way around it. She starts to do it the second she sees me get the pills from the freezer. So it wouldn't matter if I fed her before the cats. (I have to feed the cats first because once you put the dog food down, Lena INHALES it and then IMMEDIATELY RIGHT NOW RIGHT NOW OR I'LL PEE EVERYWHERE has to go outside.) But the whole time the dog is sitting there waiting, I mean after I've gotten the pills from the freezer, she drools. Like, RIVERS OF DROOL. I mean there are thick strings of drool that hang from the sides of her mouth all the way down to the floor. If her head is hanging out over the rug, she ends up leaving a slick puddle of drool on the wood floor and that puddle is at least seven inches across.

So I should just hurry up, right? No. The more I rush around, the more exciting it is to her, the more the anticipation ratchets up, the more she drools. She drools twice as much for half as long. There is no winning scenario here.

Put a towel down, then, right? No. Lena has enough trouble navigating the slippery wood floor. You put a towel down and that dog will break her neck trying to avoid it. She knows that towels are like giant banana peels.

No, all you can do is just ... deal with it. Put the food bowl down and then give Lena the okay over your shoulder as you're charging across the kitchen to get to the roll of paper towels. Oh, and guess who NEVER steps in her own puddle of drool? It's like she knows it's one of the world's top ten most disgusting substances.

It is SO GROSS. Also, do you know what is the most hideously sticky thing on your hand when you don't get enough paper towels to wipe up every last speck without any soaking through? I can't even tell you how many times I've gone all Lady Macbeth over the drool sopping through the paper towels, while Lena dances back and forth screaming desperately about how bad she has to pee.

Oh and guess what totally doesn't work. Commanding the dog to not drool.

Here a Clock, There a Clock, Everywhere a Clock Clock

2011-08-16T11:50:00.000-04:00

Do you think Uncle Henry had enough clocks? Was he obsessed with knowing what time it was? I seem to have taken lots of pictures of clocks. Everywhere I looked there was a clock. In some rooms there was a clock on every wall. No matter where you stood in that entire house, you could see a clock.

Of course no two clocks gave the same time because none of them were wound. I can't imagine how loud and tick-tocky that house must've been with all the clocks running. I also can't imagine having to wind clocks all the time. I'd need to set the alarm clock on my iPhone to remind me to wind the clocks. Uncle Henry did not have an iPhone. There was one touch-tone phone in the entire house and it was attached to an adaptor that allowed it to plug into a four-pronged jack.

Speaking of things Uncle Henry didn't have. He didn't have cable or satellite TV. He didn't have a VCR. Only some of the light switches were the flip-up-and-down kinds, and you had to put your shoulder into getting them to move. The rest of the switches were push-buttons. He didn't have a computer. He didn't even have an electric typewriter. In the bathrooms, the sinks all had separate faucets for hot and cold. The boiler in the basement was as big as a garden shed. Uncle Henry was not an early adopter.

So anyhow. The clocks.

I already posted a picture of the face of the big grandfather clock. Here are some of the most interesting small clocks. Well, I guess I should say "smaller" clocks. You couldn't carry any of these clocks without using both hands. Except maybe the last two, which were each about a foot long. Why you would want to carry them anywhere, though, I don't know. I mean, they're WALL clocks.

I Like Outlines

2011-08-15T12:01:00.003-04:00

I. The Hoarded House

A. Is It Really a Hoarded House?

I think with all the TV shows about hoarders and such, the idea of hoarding has gotten more popularized or something. Like, you know how people talk about how OCD they are? When all they mean is they have a weird quirk or are kind of anal about some things? And real OCD is, like, totally debilitating. Well, I think that's what the lawyer was doing with the whole hoarder idea. I mean, I grew up in a truly hoarded house and Uncle Henry's place looked like Martha Stewart living in comparison to that.

At the same time, no matter how neat or organized you might be about it, if most of the rooms in your house are unusable because they're filled with stuff, then I think you've got a hoarded house. Uncle Henry's house has paths everywhere, so technically all the rooms are accessible. And a few of the first-floor rooms are even sort of regular-looking. But only two of the ten rooms on the upper floors are usable.

Seriously. These people liked chairs.

And it's not like the place was perfectly clean and non-disgusting. I mean, I didn't take pictures of the gross stuff like the clogged toilet or the liquefied carrots. Or even the couch in the living room. It was all stacked with papers and books except for this one little spot, where you could see the indentation of where Uncle Henry sat all the time. It had this piece of fabric covering all the places where the stuffing was poking out, and at the spot where his head rested there was this giant greasy black smear.

I'm gonna say it's a moderately hoarded house. Not bad enough to make it onto the Hoarders show. But if you wanted to clean it up, you'd need to hire those people with dumpsters.

B. Diane Sucks at Exploring

As we were poking through rooms on our walkabout, I realized Diane doesn't know how to explore very well. We'd get to a room that had a bunch of stuff blocking the doorway and she would sort of peek her head in and make an overwhelmed expression. Meanwhile I'd be itching to climb my way to the highest point. She kept saying things look kind of precarious and then she'd want to move on to the next room. I couldn't wait to ditch her and do some serious digging. She was completely cowed by that house that barely even qualifies as a hoarded house.

C. I Like Details

Looking over the pictures I took, I see I'm not the kind of person who spends a lot of time documenting the bigger picture. Most of the things I remembered to take pictures of are just that -- things, rather than rooms. And not even whole things. Like, I would see a cool clock and instead of taking a picture of the whole clock, I would go rushing up to press my nose against the cool part.

I think I do this when I write, too. I like to get up close to the small things.

II. Pets

A. What Do They Think When They're Looking at You?

Cat thoughts:

You are blocking my view of the window.
I wonder if my food bowl is still empty.
I wonder what your raw spleen would taste like.
I could puncture your eyeball with one claw and blind you for life.
I bet if I stare fixedly at the wall behind your head I can make you turn around within two minutes.
If you even think of touching me I will rip your hand off and then puke a hairball into the bloody stump of your wrist.
Humans are so fleshy.
I could totally kill you in your sleep if I wanted to. I mean, REALLY wanted to.
June bugs make a satisfying crunch.
I think I should lick my anus now.

Dog thoughts:

I'm worried.
Why are you looking at me?
Am I in trouble?
I'm worried.
I love you I love you I love you.
Do you love me?
Do you love me now?
Now?
I'm worried.
Do you have a ball?
Did someone say "walk"?
I'm worried.
How about now, do you love me now?
OH MY GOD IS THAT FOOD?

B. Some Cats Are Not So Friendly Right Away

Allow me to introduce Roz the unhappy extra cat. You couldn't even tell we had an extra cat for the first twenty-four hours unless you walked anywhere near Diane's room. At which point you would hear a deadly sound coming from somewhere under the bed.

This morning Roz ventured out into the dining room. Justin claims Roz is silky soft, but neither Diane nor I has been brave enough to touch her yet. Roz has many extra toes and every one of them has a razor-sharp claw. In the next picture you can see her giving Miro the LOOK.

And then I made a little movement and Roz totally WHIPPED her head in my direction like the exorcist chick and made the deadly sound so I stopped trying to take pictures of her.

C. There Is No C.

I just wanted an odd number of points. But then if you figure I have two parts, each with three points, well, that means I have six, which is an even number of points. Dammit.

III. Fine, then.

A. I'll just

B. Do

C. This.

No Time to Think up Clever Titles

2011-08-13T15:03:00.000-04:00

Okay I have no idea where Diane went. I lay down to take my nap and she said she was going to go take the dog for a little walk and then come back and lie down, too. Well, I've been up for over an hour and the dog is on Diane's bed but Diane herself is nowhere to be found. Her cell phone, however, was on her bedside table and it keeps ringing and vibrating with a reminder for her to call Kate. I have no idea who Kate is. I just keep hitting the "snooze" button, thinking Diane'll be home any second, but so far no luck. I figure the fastest way to make her reappear again is to get involved in writing a blog entry. This is the same principle that guarantees as soon as I water the tomatoes, it will rain. Argh there's that stupid phone alarm! I'm not kidding: the minute I set eyes on Diane again the first thing I'm going to do is scream, "Call Kate! Call Kate!"

Also on Diane's bed is an extra cat. Apparently Justin (the person Lena the compass dog lives with) also has a cat and she (Justin, not the cat) has to go to Florida for the week so we are kenneling her pets. This means I'll be spending my upcoming days alone with a dog and an extra cat. That's right, I'll be in charge of the dog while Diane's at work. Mwahaha! Monday morning is going to start off with Lena and I having some discussions about boundaries and personal space bubbles, I can tell you that much.

See, I KNEW she would show up the minute I got interested in what I was writing.

P.S. Here's today's peek at another thing I found at the old house.

It's ELECTRIC! No hand cranking!

Me and My Dead Thing: Best Friends Forever

2011-08-12T11:08:00.010-04:00

Okay, because this is buried in yesterday's comments when really it probably deserves an entire fan page all of its own, here I am with my new BFF Sasquatch.

I speak Wookie, too.

I found this old fur coat hanging in a yummy-smelling closet-room on the third floor. I immediately fell in love and decided I had to pet it and bring it home and adopt it and name it Sasquatch. Diane was horrified and says I'm never allowed to wear it in public which of course makes me unwilling to take it off for any reason whatsoever.

Although in the first photograph I'm trying very hard to look as fashionable as it's possible to look while wrapped in a dead thing, as you might imagine, what really happens when Sasquatch and I get together is more like this:

Rawr! Are you scared yeti? Mwahaha!

I have more stuff to show you but today's a yard work day and then we're having a dinner guest and apparently it is considered IMPOLITE to sit in the middle of the living room ignoring a guest while you write a blog entry so I might not get to it until late. I wonder what our guest will think of my new friend. I think Sasquatch and I should greet her at the door with a welcoming sort of ambush. I'm trying to be more social, after all.

Before I go, though, I have a question. What kind of fur do you suppose it is? This is a man's coat, believe it or not, even though it's kind of short, like hip-length, and would, I think, look very mod with leggings and a pair of go-go boots.

Someone yesterday said maybe either fox or wolf and I almost choked. THEY MAKE COATS OUT OF FOXES AND WOLVES? Okay, foxes, okay. But seriously, wolves? Inside the coat it says "Arctic Furs." Haven't looked real close to see if there's any other information anywhere. But if I'm going to be parading around wearing a dead animal I think the respectful thing to do is at least know what kind of dead animal it is. Plus I need to know so I can make the proper sound effects. If it's wolf, that means I can howl and I like that idea a lot because I love wolf-howling. I do it all the time when Diane listens to Laura Nyro and it totally pisses her off. It's too bad it's not a dinosaur coat because I think I'm pretty good at dinosaur vocalizations, too.

Thank you in advance for all your informative responses, I'm sure.

Furrily,
Siren

Did I Mention I Have a Headache?

2011-08-11T22:13:00.001-04:00

Well, at last we're home safe and sound, and I'm showered and powdered and no longer feeling like I will kill anything that breathes or even thinks of breathing within ten feet of me. I'm not going to write much though because I have a giant headache, which is probably the result of some combination of caffeine deprivation, heatstroke, carsickness, near-asphyxiation from breathing dead moldy air, and the strain of having to exercise superhuman patience all day because someone would always wait until I got ALL THE WAY TO THE ATTIC before yelling from the basement that she needed a hand.

The first thing we did when we got there was shuffle some things around so we could sit on the floor in the living room. I was feeling kind of queasy from the car ride and it was stifling hot in there and I was not at all in the mood to take any pictures, but because I'm so dedicated to my readers I managed to snap a couple before collapsing. The first floor wasn't bad at all, just really cluttered and dusty and there were sheets over some things and piles of books and papers everywhere.

In this first picture you can sort of see the giant vases on the floor on either side of the fireplace. I asked Diane what kinds of flowers you're supposed to put in vases that size, and how you go about changing the water without killing yourself or dropping the vase, and she laughed and said she didn't think they were actually meant to be used but rather were just supposed to sit there looking expensive. It's very Victorian, she said, and even has a name: conspicuous consumption. And now I'm totally in love with the phrase "conspicuous consumption." I can't wait to finagle an opportunity to work it into casual conversation.

If you look out the window in the back of this next picture, you can see the basement floor of the carriage house. I love how the windows follow the slope of the ground. And that baby grand piano is some fancy brand name and Diane told me and I don't remember and I want to say Gloria Steinem which is close. Steinway? I think it's Steinway, maybe. I'll look it up later. When I don't have a gargantuan C-clamp trying to crush my temples into my sinus cavities. I wasn't that impressed with the piano, to be honest, since I played a couple notes and it was completely out of tune. I can't sing but I can HEAR when something is off and that piano sounded like someone ought to take it behind the house and put it out of its misery.

Then once we'd recovered a bit we stood up and appreciated firsthand how hot air rises. We decided to start with a quick tour of the house which is a completely ridiculous way of saying it because it's totally impossible to do a quick tour of a house that has twenty-three rooms, and that's not even counting the five bathrooms and the fact that we had to do the Chinese-puzzle thing in order to go from room to room. Is that racist? Do you know what I'm talking about? That sliding-tile puzzle game where you have to put all the numbers in order? Now I don't even know if it's even called a Chinese puzzle. Well anyhow I'm not trying to be racist; if I'd been trying to be racist I would've said something about a Chinese fire drill.

Edited to add: Dammit, I just looked it up, and apparently the term "Chinese puzzle" refers to a problem with a hard-to-understand solution or no solution at all. Okay fine, whatever. Somebody tell me what those sliding-tile puzzles are called.

Okay, for REAL now, my head hurts so I'm not going to write much more. So here's one last picture just to give you an idea. Seriously, this "hoarded" house is for babies. Where I come from, the stacks touched the ceilings in some places.

We didn't find anything Carolyn-related, but it was neat to see all the family pictures of her ancestors and see some glimpses into the life her mother might have had. All in all except for the HEADACHE part it was a good way to spend her second deathday. Anniversary of her death. Whatever.

Okay now I'm totally serious about stopping. I never get headaches. I never get anything, actually. Unless you count the plantar wart. So I'm not having a very stoic reaction here. If I die of an aneurysm tonight you all should feel really awful because it was probably from focusing my eyes on the bright computer screen for too long. Oh and if I don't take my turn in Scrabble I'M SORRY, okay? But I'm going to lie down. I might even go to bed, even though it's not even ten-thirty yet. Adventures are EXHAUSTING.

P.S. I love how I said I'm not gonna write much and then wrote a book.

Death and Hoarded Houses and Such

2011-08-10T12:44:00.002-04:00

Thank you, everyone, for your sweet comments and emails in response to my post yesterday. When I got that letter from myself, it made me cry. When I read it I can feel all those feelings, only now when I feel them it doesn't seem like my entire universe collapses. It's odd, though. I think what made me cry had as much to do with recognizing my own forlorn self as with the loss of Carolyn. If that makes sense.

I just got up to close the front door because it's grey and cool out today and I felt a bit chilled and as I was walking across the room my cat came tearing out of nowhere and made a beeline for the place exactly in front of my feet. Then she slammed on the brakes, which meant I had to, as well, and I ended up doing total contortions in order to a) not step on her and b) not fall over. Now I'm back at the computer again and Miro is nowhere to be found. Its like she hides somewhere, just WAITING for me to stand up so she can try to trip me. Why do cats do that? It's completely annoying, and so much for my deep melancholy Carolyn moment here.

In other news, slightly related, I guess, over the next stretch of time Diane and I will be making some day trips up to the Boston area to deal with one of Carolyn's properties. Don't ask me the details because the lawyers handle things. What I know is this particular property was the childhood home of Carolyn's mother. And for the past fifty years or so these crotchety old people have lived there. Okay this is a very long and complicated story but the basic idea is the main guy was kind of like a member of Carolyn's extended family, sort of a foster brother to Carolyn's mother. Carolyn's mother grew up, got married, went away, and the foster-ish brother (hereafter known as Uncle Henry, not his real name) did not get married and go away, but rather stayed and cared for Carolyn's grandparents as they aged. Carolyn's grandparents died when she was really little, and her mother and father died when she was sixteen, leaving only Uncle Henry in the grandparental house. Anyhow, Uncle Henry died a month or so ago and only recently have the lawyers actually gotten into the place to see what needs to happen.

And apparently what they found was a hoarded house. I've said Carolyn was a bit of a hoarder, right? Did you know the hoarding thing seems to have a hereditary aspect? And it seems Uncle Henry was rather hoardy as well. He and his caretaker/companion just sort of lived in there among all this stuff that Carolyn's GRANDPARENTS had collected. Anyhow the lawyers were like, do you want us to call a company and have them just come and shovel this place out? And if it were any other house besides Carolyn's grandparents', I'd probably be like, yeah, whatever.

Okay who am I trying to kid. I have my own hoardy urges. I was like, what? A hundred-year-old house full of stuff and you want to use SHOVELS? And the carriage house in the back is almost two hundred years old. And Carolyn came from a long line of people who NEVER THREW ANYTHING AWAY. I mean, seriously, even here, we have on file every product manual for every tool and appliance and random doodad in the house going back thirty thousand years. There could be all kinds of historical stuff there. There might even be some ancient baby pictures of Carolyn. For sure there's a ton of stuff that belonged to Carolyn's mom, who lived there for the first twenty-something years of her life.

I talked with one of the lawyers who'd been inside the house and asked her what sort of hoard we're talking about. I watch all the hoarder shows so I'm practically an expert. So I was like, how bad is it? Is it like, lots of junk and dust or were they stacking up rotten eggplants and saving their feces in plastic bags? She said it mostly looks like a lot of furniture, papers, photos, books; the two main floors of the house are cluttered but not gross; the basement is the worst, with a couple of old freezers and refrigerators full of perishable (and now perishing) stuff, including some liquefied carrots; she did not examine everywhere since the basement and the third floor are basically impossible to walk through; she did not see any feces in plastic bags. I asked if it smelled horrible and she said no, it just smelled kind of dusty and closed-in. Do you like my priorities here? How does it smell? You know I have a very sensitive nose.

"It's kind of like a time capsule," she said. "Like walking into 1910." Apparently the only changes to the place were ones that Uncle Henry's most recent caretaker made over the past year.

Okay, I just launched into this unbelievably boring explanation of all the relationships and I deleted it because really, who cares? But what came out of it was this: one of the very cool things about being filthy rich is that you have the ability to act on all those basic urges to be decent and kind. Because as I was trying to list it all out, I realized that for over half a century, ever since Carolyn's grandparents died, her family money has been supporting this Uncle Henry guy. Carolyn once described him to me as a "strange little hermit who would not have survived out in the real world." He was extremely reclusive and had some kind of weird physical condition and although she referred to him as "Uncle Henry," she wasn't close to him at all, since, as she put it, "he was basically kind of an asshole." He never had a job out in society. He lived in this giant house with his housekeeper, who eventually became HIS caretaker even though she was old and crazy, too, and then after she died, and Uncle Henry's health began to really deteriorate, Carolyn hired him a new live-in caretaker so he could live out the rest of his time in the one place he'd ever had a home. Do you know how much it costs nowadays to hire someone to go live full-time with a cranky old guy who hates everyone and is impossible to get along with? She couldn't have arranged all that without buckets of money.

Anyhow I have no idea how this turned into such a long boring story. But what I'm trying to get at is this: the lawyer grabbed a couple things from the house when she was there and we just got them in the mail yesterday and one of the things is this genealogy book and it is SO COOL. It traces ancestors all the way back to the late fifteen hundreds. Carolyn's family line on her mother's side goes straight back to a guy who was the Governor of Dover Plantation. That is New Hampshire before it was New Hampshire, for those of you who don't know every speck of history about the New England colonies.

And there's another guy, some ancestor of a brother of a mother-in-law of a third wife or some shit, whose name is George and he died in 1706 and there's a notation next to his name in this delicate old-fashioned handwriting: Killed by Indians. I don't know why I think this is funny. There's Lieutenant This, Major That, Captain This, Governor That, and then good old George, Killed by Indians.

I have no idea how to interpret this ancestor book yet. There are pages with these little windows in them and I haven't spent enough time with it to understand the charts but I love old stuff like this. It's like a big puzzle.

And it also means I will be having actual EVENTS in my life, other than being nearly killed by psychotic birds and creepily stalking every example of wildlife that dares to show up in my yard. I'll be going OUT OF TOWN every so often. We're going up tomorrow to check it out.

Oh look, it's nap time.